


I Love You Still

by nu-exo (Nekohime)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Action, Agent!johnny, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Inspired by Ghost in the Shell, M/M, Mild Blood, Smut, Violence, agent!Kun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:14:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26103247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nekohime/pseuds/nu-exo
Summary: “It’s okay,” Johnny continued, placid smile still tilting up the corner of his lips. “I’m not happy about all this either.”“Never said I wasn’t,” Kun bit out, mentally counting down the floors until Johnny would have to step off, praying the elevator would move faster.“Sure you aren’t,” Johnny said, eyeing the blinking number counter. 19, 18, 17...  “Neither of us want another unit butting in on our cases. It’s normal. The fact that it’s my unit,”  Johnny looked back over at him, gaze heavy where it landed. “Well, that’s just insult to injury, isn’t it?”
Relationships: Suh Youngho | Johnny/Qian Kun
Comments: 29
Kudos: 229
Collections: Johnkun Fic Fest Round 1 (2020), nct johnny seo and kun qian





	I Love You Still

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt #H005 for JKFF
> 
> This was...a struggle lol, largely because I picked a lovely prompt that really challenged me. I hope it came out well in the end, and that you all enjoy!
> 
> I want to quickly thank the mods for being so incredibly understanding through this process, and M and all my friends for helping me get this fic into the current state it is.
> 
> And, lastly, as per usual, please read the tags, and if this doesn't happen to be your cup of tea, feel free not to read.

Kun sat in the Bureau Director’s office and tried his best not to fidget. It was harder than he’d ever admit, to just stay still. His back ached from being kept ramrod straight, and his palms were sweating where they laid flat against his thighs. The tension in the room didn’t help much either. It was thick enough to cut with a knife, and only part of it was being caused by the worryingly serious expression the Director was wearing. The rest, well…

Kun clenched his jaw, flicking a quick glance to his side. Next to him, Johnny sat equally tense, brows slightly furrowed in thought, hands unconsciously picking at the outer seam of his pants.

The rest was six foot plus, irritatingly handsome despite the circles forming under his eyes, and still (unfortunately) everything Kun dreamt of at night when all he had were his thoughts and a slowly bubbling anger.

Kun breathed in, slowly, refocusing on the Director. _Stop_ , he chided himself. Now wasn’t the time.

“You’re likely wondering why you’re both here,” the Director started, folding his hands together on his desk. He sighed, eyed the two of them, then asked, “How much do you know about the Dressmaker?”

“Serial killer from about twenty years ago,” Johnny said, frowning if the deeper timbre of his voice was anything to go by. “He killed at least fifteen women, that we know of. He-” Johnny paused, and Kun knew that if he looked he’d see Johnny’s frown deepening, mouth turning down at the corners. “He skinned them.”

“The patches he took resembled individual parts of clothing patterns,” Kun continued, images of crime scene photos he’d seen both on the news and in police files flashing through his head unbidden. “So the media gave him the ‘Dressmaker’ moniker. He stopped after a failed kidnapping attempt with would-be victim number sixteen. Since then, there haven’t been anymore killings with the Dressmaker’s MO.”

The Director nodded, mouth set in a grim line. “Until now.”

Kun shifted in his seat, Johnny sucking in a slow breath next to him. Ah. Until now.

The Director tapped a finger against a sensor hidden in the surface of his desk, a holo-screen flickering to life between them. He twitched his fingers and a series of license photos—five women in their twenties—appeared on screen. Most of them were faces Kun was familiar with, his unit having caught their cases. Some of them weren’t, but judging by how Johnny was leaning ever-so-slightly forward in his seat, the old wood creaking as he shifted his weight, _he_ was.

“Five women in the past three months. All missing sections of skin. None of them synthetic bodies, all of them naturals,” the Director said. “These are all facts from the case files your respective units have compiled. The last of which was one of the few hold-backs we had during the first killings.”

Kun tensed. “With such a huge gap between killings we’d been suspecting a copycat, but...”

“Unfortunately,” the Director sighed, “it’s not. The Dressmaker is back. And, in an interest to get ahead of the case before it becomes a media circus like last time, I’ve decided to create a task force dedicated to the Dressmaker’s arrest. A task force you two will be leading.”

Kun blinked, body going absolutely still. _‘You two’?_

“Sir?” Johnny asked, sounding equally caught off-guard, tone ticking up a bit at the end.

“Lieutenant Seo,” the Director said, pulling up Johnny’s file, “You’ve been working closely with foreign agencies as part of Section 7 and the International Crimes Division since transferring back, to a very successful degree. You have experience leading joint investigations and tackling brutal crimes.”

Kun’s file popped up onscreen next. “Lieutenant Qian, _you_ have a track record running Section 12’s Major Crimes Division that’s honestly frightening in its efficiency. You have experience investigating high profile, difficult cases in a timely manner even with tight media coverage following your every step.” He looked between them both, eyes glowing faintly from the cybernetics they were made of. “I am firm in my belief that with your units working together, we’ll finally see some justice for all the women whose lives have been taken.”

 _Working together._ Kun didn’t think the moderately hysteric little laugh that wanted to bubble up his throat would be appropriate given the circumstances. Somehow, from morning to now, Kun went from only having to hear Johnny’s name in passing, to having to lead a _task force_ together. Kun’s hands curled into fists where they rested on his thighs. _Fuck_.

Squaring his shoulders, Kun put on his best game face though, and looked the Director in the eye. “Thank you for the trust, Director. My team will put in all the necessary effort to catch this killer and finally bring him to justice.”

“As will mine,” Johnny added. “We’ll do everything in our power to prevent further deaths.”

The Director smiled, wrinkles deepening along the lines of his eyes and mouth. Kun felt an illogical sort of pride blossom in his chest in response. The Director had always reminded Kun of his grandfather more than the older man should.

“I’m glad to hear that. You’ll have a designated space for your two units and a small team of dedicated forensics technicians for your convenience. The details for all of those arrangements will be sent to you by noon today. I expect you to be on this starting immediately.” He tapped off the holo-screen. “Good luck, Lieutenants. If experience trying to catch this murderer has taught us anything, it’s that you’ll need it.”

With that lovely sequitur and a sharp, “Yes, sir,” said at the same time, Kun pushed his chair back, trying to ignore Johnny doing the same next to him.

As they walked to the elevator, Kun tried to pretend Johnny hadn’t fallen in-step beside him, natural as could be. His strides longer, more casual in contrast to the sharper, quicker sounds of Kun’s steps.

It was something minor. Unimportant. It shouldn’t have bothered him that one of Johnny’s steps was two of his. _Stupid long legs. Who the fuck needs to be that tall anyway?_

Kun grit his teeth. He was a mature adult. He was past being petty. Kun walked a little faster, overtaking Johnny and beating him to the elevators, breathing only _slightly_ heavier from the exertion. 

Mature. Yeah.

Johnny came to a stop just behind him, and Kun fully realized that if they both took the elevator, they’d be stuck in a small metal box. Together. For however long it took to deposit one of them on their respective floor.

Kun pressed his lips into a line. Fuck. He should’ve taken the stairs.

“You know,” Johnny started, tone a casual drawl, “If you want the elevator to come, you have to actually _touch the screen_.”

A spark kicked up in Kun’s chest; the first flickers of old anger licking through his veins. He _really_ should’ve taken the stairs. Too late now, though.

He jabbed at the elevator panel, sending a sharp glare over his shoulder. “I know how to work a fucking elevator.”

A small smirk quirked at the corner of Johnny’s lips. Not necessarily unkind, but definitely not friendly. “You stood there long enough to make me wonder. What, were you catching your breath then? You _did_ seem like you were in a hurry back there.”

“Shut up,” Kun snapped, forcing himself to face forward again. Things were easier if he didn’t have to see Johnny’s face. They always were.

They waited in thick silence as the elevator came to their floor, hissing open with a too-cheery _ding!_ Kun moved aside to let the few people who’d been inside pass, nodding to a detective he recognized from another division, and then stepped on to the now empty car. Silence, again, as the elevator started to move, Kun selecting their respective floors automatically. He settled in against one side of the car, leaning his hip against the hand rail and crossing his arms over his chest, valiantly ignoring the little sound Johnny had made when Kun knew which floor to press for him without asking.

It was common knowledge, he told himself, staring out the elevator’s clear walls of reinforced polymer, watching the scenery around them grow as it slid down on its mag-rails. No reason he shouldn’t know what floor Section 7 and IC was on. They all worked in the same damn building.

“You really haven’t changed much, have you?”

Kun whipped his head around, eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

Johnny was leaning against the other side of the elevator, stance mirroring Kun’s but for his hands tucked away in his pockets. He held Kun’s glare with dark, hooded eyes, expression unreadable.

Unnerving, because Johnny had always been open and earnest back when they were in the academy. Frustrating, because it was a reminder of how much things had really changed.

“When you’re fuming about something, or over thinking,” Johnny said, jutting his chin out to gesture at Kun, “Your eyebrows do this...thing. It hasn’t changed.”

“They don’t,” Kun snapped, frowning.

Johnny smiled, lopsided and without a hint of humor in it. “Mm. Sure.”

A muscle in Kun’s jaw jumped from how hard he was grinding his teeth. He felt like he was being baited, poked to see if he’d blow and prove Johnny’s point.

“It’s okay,” Johnny continued, placid smile still tilting up the corner of his lips. “I’m not happy about all this either.”

“Never said I wasn’t,” Kun bit out, mentally counting down the floors until Johnny would have to step off, praying the elevator would move _faster_.

“Sure you aren’t,” Johnny said, eyeing the blinking number counter. _19, 18, 17.._. “Neither of us want another unit butting in on our cases. It’s normal. The fact that it’s _my_ unit,” Johnny looked back over at him, gaze heavy where it landed. “Well, that’s just insult to injury, isn’t it?”

The elevator dinged and the door slid open with a quiet hiss. Kun stared up at Johnny, eyes wide from a combination of shock and hurt. Johnny stared evenly back. They’d never admitted it out loud so plainly before. The fact that they couldn’t stand to be near each other. That they avoided each other. And when they _did_ cross paths it was with a cool, sharp sort of animosity.

 _God,_ Kun thought, in his heart of hearts, a small voice crying out too far from the surface to matter, _how did we get here?_

But then he remembered. The things that had happened. The things they’d _said_. Johnny leaving like it was fucking nothing. Like _Kun_ was nothing. And then his own anger, not nearly as controlled, was rolling through him like a wave, filling his lungs until it was almost too hard to breathe.

“You’re right,” Kun said, an edge to his tone that could’ve scored metal. “It _is_ just adding insult to injury. Since we don’t have a choice, though, the least _you_ can do is fucking smile and wave and not slow my team down.” He tilted his head towards the still open elevator door, eyes not leaving Johnny. “Get off, we’re supposed to be ready to report to our new squad room by noon. I don’t want to be late because of you.”

Johnny regarded him with a glint of mean satisfaction flashing through his eyes. Like Kun had just proven him right, failing a test he didn’t know he’d been taking. Kun, arms crossed, nails digging painfully into his biceps, decided he didn’t give a fuck. Johnny wasn’t any better.

He watched as Johnny slid past, the faint whiff of familiar cologne trailing him making Kun’s throat feel tight. Kun watched, burning a hole in Johnny’s back, until the doors closed again and he was gone from sight.

 _You don’t get to judge_ , he thought, anger bitter on the back of his tongue. _Of all people, you don’t get to fucking judge_.

01101001

Kun stood by the main screen in their new squad room and tried not to bust a vein.

He’d spent a solid hour outlining how things were going to go down to his squad: they’d been assigned to work with International Crimes in a joint task force to catch the Dressmaker. Yes, _that_ unit. Yes, with Lieutenant Seo. And, most importantly, _no_ , there would be no hazing or petty vindictiveness. Not on their end, at least. They—Kun’s pride and joy and sometimes pain in his ass—would be on their _best behavior_. If anyone started shit, it would _not_ be them.

And yet. Kun took a slow, seething breath in through his nose, a muscle in his jaw jumping. Hidden from view by the way he’d crossed his arms, his fists were curled into tight fists. He’d kill Ten later, he decided, trying to glare down the man in question. Another slow breath, accompanied by a short, ineffectual countdown from twenty in his head. Maybe throttle Kunhang and Yangyang while he was at it, since they’d decided to join the whirlpool of chaos and confrontation Ten had decided to be today.

Ten, flicking a glance at him, had the nerve to smile. He turned his eyes back on Johnny, expression going from impish to saccharine sweet and dripping with venom in the blink of an eye. 

“Never thought we’d be working with _you_ ,” he said, tone lilting and musical and all around dangerous. “Really, what an _honor_.”

 _An hour of my life_ wasted _trying to talk these idiots down from doing something stupid_. Like trying to defend his honor, or, say, picking a fight with an agent both higher ranked _and_ easily a whole head taller.

Ten, whose body was mostly android at this point, strong cybernetics under soft faux skin, was an impressive fighter, but even he’d have a hard time taking Johnny down. Though that clearly wasn’t going to stop him from trying to snap at the other man on Kun’s behalf.

Johnny, wry, humorless smile twisting his lips, eyed Ten like he’d expected this type of reaction, responding with an easy, “Oh? I’m flattered. And here I was telling my team how special it was to be working with Major Crimes and Lieutenant Qian.” Said team, Kun noted, was glaring right back, at this point. Young faces creased with protective anger. Johnny turned to give Kun a cold, narrow-eyed smile. “Right, Kun?”

Kun almost flinched at the sound of his name rolling off Johnny’s tongue, catching himself at the last second.

Johnny, of course, caught it anyway. His smile turned just a touch sharper even as it seemed to widen amicably. “We’ll try not to _slow you down_.”

Getting his own words thrown back at him shouldn’t have bothered him all that much. It was petty, and childish, and such obvious bait, Kun should’ve been able to let it slide without getting riled up. He knew that, but… 

_Fucker_ , Kun resisted the urge to outright growl. For fuck’s sake, they’d just barely sat down to debrief both units and go over their respective cases before things had all but flown downhill in a free fall drop.

From the corner of his eye, Kun saw his whole team bristle and shot them a warning look before turning back to Johnny with his best politician smile plastered on his face. “It’d be hard to work here and not hear about your own unit, _Johnny_. So young still and so accomplished.” He let his eyes curve up into crescents, smile widening until his cheeks hurt. “I’m sure slowing each other down won’t be a problem at all!”

 _So if you do_ , his expression said, sunny in its threat, _I’ll just assume it’s on purpose_.

Johnny snorted, his own smile crooked and just as mean. _Right back at you_.

With the tension in the room sufficiently poised to snap, someone cleared their throat.

As one, the room’s attention swiveled to the person who was now standing just inside the squad room’s threshold, a laptop under one arm and a heavy, sturdy looking briefcase hanging from the other, dressed in the standard red of psymechs. He looked between them all with a mild, pleasant smile playing on his lips.

“Sorry, is this a bad time?”

Kun and Johnny glanced at each other, the latter clearing his throat and looking away first. 

“You are...?”

“Moon Taeil. I was told to swing by and get your team all synced up.” He swept a deceptively sharp look over everyone’s faces, expression not faltering even a bit. “If now’s a bad time, though, I can come back later.”

Kun softened the edges of his smile and forced as much tension out of his shoulders as he could. “No, no, it’s fine. If you can do it now it’d be a great help.”

“Great,” Taeil chirped, setting his laptop down gently on one of the desks the room had been supplied with before hauling up the briefcase with a small grunt and a dull _thud_. He turned back to them, pulling over a few chairs. “Then if I could have both Lieutenants come over first?”

Kun saw Johnny try not to grimace and fail from the corner of his eye, snorting softly at how really, some things never changed. 

_If rumors held true, though_ , Kun thought, eyeing the line of Johnny’s body under his button up and well-worn slacks as he followed behind him to the tech, _then a lot had_.

“Lieutenant Seo, if you could sit here,” the smaller man said, motioning to one of the seats he’d pulled up. “And Lieutenant Qian, here please.”

The seats were too close and Johnny—by no design of his own as he actively squirmed in discomfort, trying to shrink in on himself—was just too big. Their knees knocked together, elbows and shoulders bumping as they tried to get settled in a way that had them as far from each other as possible.

It had Kun’s mouth drawing down in displeasure, frustrated largely with how bright sparks of interest pinged every time he brushed up against the taller man. His body happy where his mind was decidedly not.

Kun, seated as contained as possible, Johnny’s warmth radiating too close for comfort and the air between them thick with something like irritation and unease from their forced proximity, turned to the tech with a tight smile. “Does this work for you, Mr. Moon?”

“Taeil, please,” the man said, snapping open his briefcase and calling to life a glowing array of holo-screens and adjustment panels. “And I don’t know why I didn’t think you two would take up so much space when you, Lieutenant Seo, are a literal giant, but a little cramped is still fine for me. So long as I can reach your link ports.”

Johnny blinked, brows pulling down into a small, mildly offended frown at being outright called a giant by someone who was, objectively, short. Kun, resisting the urge to roll his eyes despite the way he was already intensely side-eyeing the other man, tried his best to keep his attention forward. 

“That’s good to hear then...” He watched Taeil flit his fingers over two of the screens, connection lines slithering out at his command from a hard-case compartment, mind blanking.

Somehow, even with a psymech sitting in front of him, work kit out and activated, it hadn’t fully sunk in that in a few minutes, Johnny would be in his head. Not fully let loose—because cyberbrains worked like any other personally coded structure and had as many defenses available as could be set up by a skilled hand—but still, in his head.

He tried not to think about how intimate it’d feel to hear Johnny’s voice humming in his mind, bypassing his auditory faculties entirely. He _really_ tried not to think about the one time they’d tried it in the past, giggly and drunk on a weekend night with a simple dual end cable between them that they’d swiped while they were both still in the academy; when things were still dusted in the soft, warm hues of rose colored lenses.

Johnny’s voice had set him on fire, then, in the best way possible. He was worried about what it would do now.

And then that too was being carefully pushed from his thoughts as Taeil gently plugged the connector line into one of the ports set into the back of Kun’s neck, before taking a few steps to the side to do the same to Johnny.

“Okay,” Taeil said, sitting back down at his holo-screens after plugging the connector cables in at the back of both their necks. He typed in a few commands at a standard keyboard, the clacks of the softly glowing keys loud to Kun’s ears, and then Kun felt it: the slow, cool seep of electrical output coming through his port. It had him shivering and rolling his shoulders as the sensation arced down his spine, even though he knew the connection was going up to his brain. Next to him, Johnny let out a controlled sigh, linked fingers whitening a bit around the knuckles before the tension was easing from the line of his body on his next breath in. “Connection to cyberbrain systems stable, establishing the link between you two now.”

Kun let his eyes drift closed, receding into the digital portion of his brain, the glowing walls of his lobby coming up around him in greeting. There was a slight buzz along the base of his skull as the data link was formed, a vague sensation that disappeared as quickly as it came. Kun imagined it coming together, a series of ones and zeroes in the form of glowing bricks, connecting to a large gated entrance where there’d previously been a smooth, semi-transparent wall.

Kun stood in his mindscape, observing the link form with a trickling of apprehension he couldn’t manage to completely wrangle. On the other side would be Johnny. Just a thought away.

The bridge connected, seamlessly fusing with the edges of Kun’s mindscape.

Taeil’s voice came filtering through Kun’s consciousness. “Link established. Lieutenant Qian, if you could test it for me.”

Kun squared himself, taking the short steps needed for his virtual form to push open the gates blocking off the bridge. Hearing his pulse beat loud in his ears, Kun thought one, intentional word out into the digital ether:

 _John_.

Nothing, for a hesitating second, but the faint beeps of the technicians gear relaying system diagnostics. Then, vibrating through his head like a warm purr and slipping down his back all the way to his toes:

 _Kun_.

“It works,” Kun said, trying not to shiver as he blinked his eyes open. He gave Taeil a tight smile, avoiding the itch to look over at Johnny and see if Kun’s voice in _his_ head was dredging up the same memories it was for Kun.

 _That’s a prickly path with nothing but anger and hurt_ , Kun reminded himself. _Don’t go down it. Not again_.

Taeil smiled pleasantly back. “Fantastic! I’ll need you two to stay hooked up here while I work on your team since you’ve been serving as the central junction point for them, but before that, would you like any security updates? Specialized firewalls? I see your encryption is all up-to-date for anti-hacking, but if you’d like something more specific in addition to that?”

He looked between the two of them, eager in the way most psymechs were at the prospect of getting to tinker around with core system coding. Anyone who worked as an active field agent was automatically at higher risk for hacking attempts, which presented the specialized technicians the best opportunity to test the mettle of any newly developed software.

It meant being a bit of a guinea pig, but in Kun’s experience it usually paid off.

He nodded, rubbing his hands over his knees absentmindedly. “A stronger lobby defence would be nice. Something more complex.”

Taeil’s smile widened, eyes glittering. He turned to Johnny. “And you, Lieutenant Seo? Your records say the majority of your body, bar your right arm, has gone through cybernetic enhancement. Nine times out of ten, arms and legs are breaching points, since the software isn’t as secure. I could add a few more barrier layers there, if you were interested.”

Johnny chuckled, something low and slightly startled. “If you’d like, I don’t have any complaints against getting some upgrades.”

The smaller man seemed inordinately excited at the prospect of getting to work on them both. It was, Kun decided after some mulling over, much more endearing than it was concerning, and so he sat back and let the tinkering happen, testing at the strength of the fresh additions once they were fully in place. He sat through Taeil bringing up more chairs for the rest of their units—eventually giving up when it was clear everyone was just as content to sit on the handful of empty desks—watching as the technician set to linking them all up.

He sat, and he thought, dangerously, of Johnny’s mods. Evidently, the rumors _had_ been true. 

It was interesting, though. Johnny had never been particularly against modifications or cybernetic prothesis, but he’d never been particularly _excited_ about them either.

( _“I’m pretty content with my body as is,” Johnny said cheerily, wiping sweat from his brow with the hem of his shirt, giving Kun a wonderful flash of toned stomach and smooth skin. “Doesn’t seem worth the money. Now, if_ you _wanted to go full android to be a little taller, I wouldn’t judge you at al- ow! No punching!”_

 _Kun, red in the face and hopelessly crushing, hit him in the arm again._ )

Kun wondered what had happened. If _something_ had happened. Or, if somewhere along the line, Johnny had just...changed. 

_You don’t know him_ , a small voice said, gentle and sad. _Not anymore_.

Kun rolled his shoulders, uncomfortable with the bitterness rising up to sit on his tongue at that thought. He didn’t _want_ to know Johnny anymore. Probably didn’t know him from the start. That’s what led to all these years of ugliness, right?

Right?

Kun hadn’t realized he’d been staring, so when Johnny cleared his throat, an awkward but carefully small sound, he ended up sucking in a sharp breath, almost jumping in his seat.

Johnny was looking at him, a handful of expressions Kun couldn’t place flickering through his eyes before settling on something neutral and guarded.

“Something on my face?”

Kun’s hands curled over his thighs, nails digging into the fabric of his slacks until he felt the dull ache of the crescents he was pressing into the skin under. “No.” A pause, where he considered asking the question he wanted to, where he wondered if it was something he could ask as a co-worker who’d once been something else, something more personal and less...formal. Less mean and angry and bitter. 

Kun considered it. “No,” he turned away, jaw set, “Nothing at all.”

00100000

Once Taeil was done and gone, everyone linked up, it was silently agreed on that they should get their squad room into some semblance of order. They all set to moving around the empty desks and bulletin boards the space came with into the arrangements and positions they all preferred—Kun having to remind Dejun and Yangyang more than once to be _gentle_ with the boards, because their clear, glass-like screens were nice and fragile and horribly expensive. 

Naturally they clumped up by unit, as much as they could, the odd number of Johnny's unit meaning that one of the younger looking men was sent skittering towards where Yukhei was carrying his desk like it weighed nothing. It left the one, vaguely office shaped room for both Johnny and Kun, unless they chose to not use it. Though Kun very much wanted to, not having had a space like that to himself before despite his position, and he doubted Johnny would be willing to give it up either, used to the luxuries of the unit he'd been leading for the past five years.

Kun pressed his lips into a line, mulling the possibility of having to share a personal space with Johnny again over in his head as he helped Kunhang hip check his desk into place.

He didn't like the idea, he decided. The office would be useless to him if he couldn't focus, and if he had to share with Johnny, he'd be constantly distracted by all the things that'd want to bubble up and be said. Dangerously angry, vindictive things.

Kun would rather sit with his team and be constantly wary of the potentially dangerous bobbles Ten liked to keep on his desk.

"You're making a dumb face," Ten casually pointed out as he passed by behind him, two chairs hoisted up on his shoulders like they weighed nothing.

It brought Kun soundly out of his thoughts, back to the low hum of conversation serving as background noise in the room as everyone settled in. He cut a quick glance to the side to see Ten putting the chairs down before throwing himself into one with a pleased sigh, kicking his feet up on the desk he'd evidently claimed like he knew Kun hated.

Ten smiled up at him, winsome and bright and mischievous by default. "It's your, 'I'm thinking too much' look. The one where your eyebrows do the thing."

Kun sucked in a sharp breath, thrown back to the conversation with Johnny in the elevator. _“When you’re fuming about something, or overthinking, your eyebrows do this...thing. It hasn’t changed.”_ He raised a hand to his forehead now, like he couldn't do back then, ears heating with mortification of how right Johnny had been.

"Fuck," he grumbled.

"Is it because of him?" Ten asked, voice lowered so his words were only for Kun.

Kun opened his mouth, ready to say no, to lie in the hopes that speaking it out loud would somehow make it true. But then he remembered that this was Ten, who'd been privy to so much more of the mess that was Kun and Johnny, Johnny and Kun, before everything crumbled out from under Kun's feet like a house of cards. Back when Kun only had eyes for Johnny and the sunshine he seemed to carry with him wherever he went, magnetic and oh so alluring.

Ten had seen the Before, witnessed from a distance, having been in the same academy batch as them, sharp eyes always noticing more than people assumed. And then, he'd experienced the After. He'd been the one to approach a Kun who'd been left behind, left without the only tether he hadn't even realized he'd formed. He'd been the one to listen when Kun eventually broke down and told him everything, pouring his feelings out in the ugliest tears, sobbing out sounds he didn't even know his throat could make.

So, instead of offering up a weak lie that would only offend his friend, he took in a breath and said: "Yes."

"You sure you don't want me to fuck with his tech?" Ten asked, dropping his feet off the desk and sitting forward, eyes dark and serious as he looked up at Kun. "Maybe make it so he only sees a chicken icon when he looks in the mirror? I could do it, you know."

Kun smiled, reaching out to brush a gentle touch over Ten's shoulder. He knew Ten could do it. Knew that he _would_ , if Kun wanted him to. Appreciated that loyalty and love more than he'd ever be able to put into words.

"No," he said, laughing lightly. "It's fine. I can handle him." 

He glanced up, then, eyes automatically drifting towards Johnny in the inevitable light chaos and excitement that had finally taken the room. Johnny, standing tall amongst the young men that made up his squad, was already looking at Kun, his gaze dark and heavy and simmering with a heat Kun could almost feel on his skin.

Kun held his gaze, refusing to be the first to look away and break it. He might've blushed and broken under those eyes once, but not anymore. Kun _could_ handle him, now. He had to.

01101100

Working alongside Johnny and his team was as strange and nerve-wracking as Kun had initially expected it to be, but it was also frighteningly easy.

They were, at the end of the day, on the same side, and _good_ at their jobs. They wouldn’t have been selected for the task force otherwise,regardless of whether they’d originally caught the cases or not.

Johnny deferred to Kun for the first briefing they held, speaking up only to catch Kun’s unit up to speed on the two cases Section 12 had caught. He let him relay what the Director had told them and go over the tasks they needed to tackle first, not interrupting even once, only pitching in when questions were asked.

It was...odd, to say the least, and had Kun’s guard up and on high alert.

He’d expected Johnny to be more antagonistic, more disruptive, challenging Kun at every opportunity; that’s how things had been up to now. Instead, Johnny sat back and let Kun lead. Kun wasn’t sure that was honestly much better.

He could feel Johnny’s eyes on him the entire time, hot on the back of his neck. Judging, likely; looking for a slip-up that wouldn’t happen. He sat back and stared, gaze heavy lidded as Kun paired-up members of both their teams—determined to put those with the most compatible skillsets together despite which unit they were part of. 

Kun knew enough about Johnny’s team by reputation and a quick perusal of their files to know that Mark—who anyone could see upon first meeting was bright and determined—would do well with newer witness interviews; the ones that were usually more emotional, families and friends of the victims less jaded by the passing of time and more raw with fresh agony. He got paired directly with Ten who, while oftentimes an unpredictable element, was exceptionally good with people and never shirked his responsibility when leading others in the field.

Sicheng, whose calm demeanor served well with witnesses from older cases who carried more grief-driven bitterness with them than anything else, was matched with Renjun and Jeno, the two younger men giving off an air of even-headedness that just went better with fieldwork in general.

Dejun, Kun decided after some deliberation, would be with Donghyuck and Chenle, going over the crime scene files and checking in on forensics, because that was where the least amount of work-flow disturbance could occur. Which left the youngest between their two units, Jisung, to go revisit the crime scenes with Kunhang, Yukhei, and Yangyang. (With strict instructions, of course, to be kind to the younger man or face the consequences.)

Kun decided that, loathe as he was to admit it, he and Johnny would be the best choices for talking to the detectives who handled the previous Dressmaker cases. There was a certain level of territorial behavior that came with leading an investigation, an easily bruised pride that grew the longer you couldn’t solve it—and that was putting aside the animosity between the general network of police and the Sector Bureau. It would just be easier for two Lieutenants to handle things than to send any of the others.

“Which ward do you want to go to first?” Johnny asked, head bent over the physical copies of their case files, hair falling forward in a curtain. He was starting to get grays, Kun noted, strands of silver that looked frustratingly attractive peppered into Johnny’s otherwise dark hair. “The 5th had the most amount of cases fall under their jurisdiction with a count of five, but the 3rd had the most brutal killing.” He shuffled through until he found the file he was looking for and flipped it open, hospital photos of a bruised and scared young woman staring back up at them first thing. “And then there’s the 1st ward, where the only surviving victim was grabbed.”

Kun sighed, arms crossed over his chest, trying his best not to think about how with their teams mobilized, they were mostly alone, left to work out their game plan in the squad room’s office space.

“The survivor, Han Meiling, lives in the 7th ward now,” Kun said, mentally preparing himself to have to defend his opinion—because even if Johnny asked, there was no way he’d just _listen_ to what Kun suggested. “We _should_ start there, see what she remembers, then head back to see how her details match up with what the original detectives found. See if there’s a pattern that hadn’t been picked up.”

Instead of disagreeing, though, Johnny hummed, nodding at what Kun had said without looking up. “Makes sense. The investigation wasn’t centralized until too late the first time around. It would’ve been harder to see a bigger picture.”

Kun stared at him, thrown. He blinked out of the slight stupor only when Johnny glanced up at him, expression carefully neutral despite the raised curve of an eyebrow.

Kun cleared his throat, feeling a frown drag his brows down even as the tips of his ears began to burn. “Right. Exactly. With any luck, we’ll catch something that was missed the first time. After all, there has to be something linking these women together beyond their general age.”

“Mm,” Johnny intoned, “It won’t be luck, though.”

Kun felt his brow twitch, “Pardon?”

Johnny shrugged, standing up straight and rolling out his neck, “We didn’t get here through luck, did we? Won’t catch this guy through it either.” He looked at Kun, then, holding his gaze in what felt like a challenge. “Or do you think you owe all your success so far to chance?”

Kun felt his hackles rise at Johnny’s stare, body going tense even though what he was saying, the way he was looking at him, didn’t _feel_ antagonistic. Challenging, yes, but not...bad. It left Kun a bit off-kilter.

 _Not the best way to start a case as important as this_.

“No,” Kun finally said, sighing through his nose, running a hand through his hair as he tried not to think of all the blood, sweat, and tears that had gone into getting to where he was, all the anger that had helped fuel him to become a Lieutenant and team leader at thirty-five. “I don’t.”

01101111

Kun had always imagined working on a team with Johnny. It had been something bright and happy to think about when they were both still in the academy, going through their training. 

He’d slip into fantasies of working long hours to break a case, heads bent together over evidence and witness statements, scouring the digital archives and video footage of crime scenes until one of them found the key piece to solve everything. 

He knew they were ridiculous, then; working cases was grueling, he’d learned that much from watching his father come home after long days and long nights, exhausted and drained. There wasn’t anything fantastic about it. But, Kun, _then_ , had been a little—or a lot—in love with Johnny, whose presence could fill a room. A little blinded by the hope that whatever they were could grow into something more, that Johnny felt the same way. 

Kun, _now_ , could still feel remnants of those feelings, beaten low by bitterness and hurt and anger. He knew better, had hardened himself to the truth that he’d been the only one with his head in the clouds, and moved on. Sort of. Mostly.

It didn’t help that he hadn’t been entirely wrong, though.

Johnny took charge of the car, choosing to physically drive instead of letting the car’s AI take over—claiming it relaxed him, something he used to do often, apparently, while back in the States—while Kun sunk into the safety of his thoughts.

Johnny didn’t pry or pick or snipe the way Kun had expected him to. He let Kun drift into the sea of his lobby, the digital scape welcoming him with gentle, sun dappled waters. He let him float away, further and further, until the tropical fish made up of 1s and 0s became tiny moving windows, clips of the past, memories typically kept carefully filed away rising to the surface.

Johnny and him, whispering over a shared cigarette deep into the night, huddled together against the cold, young and hopeful. Johnny, sparring with him, smiling bright and playful as he easily pinned Kun to the practice mat, his weight heavy and warm over Kun, almost suffocating— _and still lighter then than he’d be now, so much of his body finely crafted cybernetics_. 

And then there were flashes of Johnny’s hands gripping at his naked waist, his hips, fingers leaving bruises as he fucked up into Kun with soft grunts puffed out against the sweat-damp skin of Kun’s neck. The most vivid type of memory he had from those days—the most haunting—and the one most dearly guarded.

“We’re here,” Johnny said, voice reaching Kun in the hidden corner of his mind he’d retreated to.

Kun blinked his eyes open, taking stock of the holo-screen hovering over the car’s dashboard and the GPS blinker signifying that they were at Han Meiling’s most recent address, well into the 7th ward. Kun glanced out the car window, looking up the length of the building they were parked outside of. It was a little run-down, cramped looking windows and rain water stains taking up the space of the street facing facade.

To be expected, Kun thought, for a grad student who’d had to uproot her life after a traumatic event with little time to save and prepare.

“Do you want to lead?” Johnny asked as they climbed out of the car, checking his holster absently and patting down his pockets for his ID.

Kun considered it. His instincts—the ones honed from years of trying to prove himself, and earn his position, all while battling off comparisons to Johnny and jurisdictional fights with Johnny’s team—told him that, yes, he wanted to take lead. The more logical part of him knew that he shouldn’t, though.

Kun knew his strengths. He served as a pillar for his team, a solid, steady presence that would back them up and guide them. Johnny was always more of the people person between them. He could stand his ground and lead—clearly, his record really did speak for itself as much as Kun hated to admit—but he shined when interacting with people. Kun had seen him worm his way out of demerits in the academy with smiles and good-natured laughter, he’d seen him talk down another academy cadet from a panic attack, all soothing voice and gentle, cautious hands.

Johnny was the better choice.

Kun coughed to clear his throat, licked his lips—a nervous tick making an unwanted reappearance—and shook his head. “No. You should.”

From the corner of his eye, Kun saw Johnny’s eyebrows inch up. A reaction he probably tried to control but couldn’t entirely smother.

It irked Kun, though he couldn’t argue the shock wasn’t deserved. Normally, he wouldn’t have given in, but being close to Johnny again after years of hating him, mostly from afar, made the past surface in a way that had him caving to the ever-present seed of longing buried deep in his chest; a nasty thing that filled his lungs up with all the _what-ifs_ he thought he’d managed to quash.

“Okay then,” Johnny said, clearly going for gentle as he rounded the car and fell into step beside Kun, entering the building, air conditioning whirring overhead in greeting, the cool air settling damp on their skin. It was the type of tone used on small, startled animals and the distraught family members of victims. Kun tried not to scowl at it. Johnny, ever-perceptive, caught it anyway. Then, less soft while they waited for the elevator to arrive—a decrepit old model that glided silently on its magnetic rails but groaned in complaint when it’s rust-red doors opened up: “Needless to say, jump in at any point.”

Kun nodded, jaw tight, the distinct feeling of standing off-kilter bothering him into shifting his weight between his feet. “Of course.”

“And,” Johnny hesitated, Kun looking over at him in time to catch the grimace that flashed across his face, “could we…”

He trailed off, meeting Kun’s eyes with a small apologetic tilt to his mouth, tapping the back of his neck where his port panel was.

“Yeah,” Kun said, trying to keep his tone from going tight. He knew when the psymech came by to link them up that he’d need to allow Johnny into his mind at some point, for work purposes. He sunk into his lobby for a second—the digital scape filling in around him—and picked out the entrance he’d designated for Johnny, opening the door to him and sending out a straightforward thought: _Don’t wander_.

Johnny’s shoulders hitched up, startled, his body language easy to read to Kun’s practiced eye. He cleared his throat, straightened out his back. After a moment he replied: _Of course._

They rode up the elevator in an uncomfortable silence, Johnny shooting Kun glances Kun pretended not to see, and Kun biting down words—harsh ones, true ones—that he didn’t feel like he should say.

They walked out onto the 10th floor in a similar silence, the open-air walkway letting the humidity of the day wash back over them. Kun picked absently at his button up, hoping he wasn’t sweating too noticeably; a little jealous that Johnny probably didn’t sweat the same, depending on whether the prosthetics of his arms went beyond the joint of his shoulders or not.

“1023, 1023,” Johnny muttered under his breath, striding a little ahead unconsciously, body angling in front of Kun when he came up on the door they were looking for. “Aha.”

Kun rolled his eyes—not quite annoyed but not necessarily fond—and stepped around him to knock, bumping him to the side a little with his shoulder. Not _too_ hard, not _too_ rude.

They waited. No answer. Another knock. No answer.

They waited five minutes, ten, the two of them growing progressively antsier, a cold chill rolling down Kun’s back. 

_What if something happened to her? What if she got grabbed again? The Dressmaker had never lost a victim, what if he—_

“Kun.” That gentle voice again, a big, familiar hand hovering near his shoulder, hesitating. “She’s probably not in. We can check back tomorrow. Or on the weekend. She could be at work.”

 _Right_. Kun let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, uncurling his fists and feeling the cool wash of blood flowing through to his fingers again. _Right._

They left, an apprehensive buzz still settled along Kun’s muscles, Johnny hovering just along the edges of Kun’s personal space radiating a worry Kun was startled to sense. A worry he didn’t _expect_ to _ever_ feel directed at him again.

Johnny drove them back to the bureau building, not commenting when Kun walked ahead of him, beelining for the elevators, the setting sun casting them in warm shades of orange and red through the reinforced glass walls as they rode up to their squad room’s floor. 

He didn’t say anything when Kun went straight to Ten and Sicheng, either, huddled over their notes with Mark and Renjun, all four of them frowning. Instead, Johnny silently accepted the unsaid dismissal, no sharp words or directed call-outs made, going over to where Dejun and Donghyuck were looking through older forensics files while munching through a pile of snacks.

Ten and Sicheng made space for Kun, Mark and Renjun greeting him with polite nods and curious glances. Kun tried to ignore Renjun’s left eye—the iris a telling, glowing green—not keen to think about the bio data he was picking up just at a glance, Kun’s heart rate still ticking at a pace higher than normal.

“Rough day?” Ten asked.

Kun sighed, rubbed a hand over his face. “No, not particularly.” Then, when Ten and Sicheng gave him matching looks of just slightly un-masked disbelief, a single brow raised each: “Just a little wound up. That’s all.”

Ten narrowed his eyes. “Because of…”

Kun could feel Mark’s and Renjun’s gazes heavy on his skin, and, from across the room, Johnny’s—molten where it landed.

“No,” Kun said, surprised by the fact that it wasn’t entirely a lie. He smiled. “Just the case. It got bigger so quickly, I’m just a little tired. Don’t worry about it.”

Ten and Sicheng didn’t look particularly convinced, but they let it go.

Kun nodded his head towards the files the four of them had been pouring over. “So, what did you guys get so far?”

01110110

Learning that some of the family members and older witnesses from the Dressmaker’s earlier murders had essentially up and vanished—presumably having moved—without telling anyone where they were going, didn’t leave the best taste in Kun’s mouth.

_“Neighbors who lived near all of them all said the same thing,” Mark had relayed, a frowning pout dragging his brows down. “They were twitchy, always looking over their shoulders like they thought they were being watched, and then poof, they packed up and were gone.”_

_“We’re checking in with relatives tomorrow,” Renjun had added, meeting Kun’s eyes head-on in a way Mark didn’t, “to see if they know where our people disappeared to.”_

It was a sound plan, but the necessity of it, and for so many people associated with the earlier killings to boot, made Kun nervous about his and Johnny’s second attempt to make contact with Han Meiling.

“You’re not breathing again,” Johnny pointed out in a low tone as they walked towards Han Meiling’s apartment.

Fuck. Kun sucked in a long breath, feeling dizzy for a moment with the sudden rush of oxygen, clenching his jaw against the irrational burst of anger that flared at Johnny being right.

“Some of the past witnesses are unreachable,” he said, “Missing. The sister of the fourth victim, and the mother of one of the more recent victims, too.”

Johnny hummed, giving Kun a look that he didn’t want to parse, feeling judged for his lack of calm. “Mark and Renjun told me.”

That Ten and Sicheng didn’t went unsaid. Pettier on Kun’s men’s part than he’d like them to be when they were all under the press _and_ bureau’s microscope while hunting the Dressmaker, but not outright insubordinate. Kun would let it go.

“If Han Meiling were dead, though, she likely would’ve shown up by now,” Johnny continued, “There’s no reason the Dressmaker wouldn’t pick up where he left off if he got his hands on her.”

Kun stopped in front of Han Meiling’s apartment again, Johnny pausing just far enough away for Kun to not feel encroached on, and knocked.

Johnny was right. Kun didn’t want to admit it, though, despite the mantra of ‘ _Be the bigger man’_ he’d been repeating for the past few days now. So he let Johnny’s statement go unanswered.

Just like the knock on the apartment door.

“Like I said yesterday,” Johnny started, “she might be working right now. It’s the middle of the week we could—”

Kun knocked again, harder. Johnny sighed.

“Kun, could you just—”

“You’re not going to get any answer there.”

Kun and Johnny whipped their heads to the side in tandem, thoroughly snuck up on by a small elderly woman wearing a vivid shade of orange-red lipstick, a motorized grocery trolley paused at her side. She smiled up at them, the expression stretching just a touch too wide.

Kun tried not to show his unsettlement.

“You’re looking for Meiling, right?” she asked, making a move to putter past them that had Johnny stepping back and Kun hurrying to press himself up against the door so she and her machine could move easily. “She went to stay with a friend a few days ago.”

“She did?” Johnny asked, quicker on the recovery. “Did she say why?”

“No,” the woman said, mouth twisting into a considering line—still a bit off, in Kun’s opinion. “Seemed spooked, though, the poor dear.”

Kun stepped forward to help the older woman get her door open for the apartment one down from Meiling’s—an old fashioned swing door with a keypad lock—ushering the grocery trolley in first. “She didn’t happen to mention where her friend lives, did she?” he asked.

The woman looked him over with a critical eye. “Who did you boys say you were again?”

“Ah, we didn’t, ma’am,” Johnny said, coming over to join them, pulling his ID out of his jacket pocket. “We’re with the Sector Bureau, we just wanted to talk with Ms. Han about a few things.”

“Oh my, such important young men,” she said, leaning against the door, fingers tapping out an absent rhythm. “I hope Meiling isn’t in any trouble.”

“She’s not, ma’am,” Johnny assured, giving her his most winsome smile—a deadly weapon that Kun had never seen fail, even when used on him in the past. Maybe especially when used on him. “Like my partner here said, we just want to talk with her.”

The old woman considered them, pursing her lips while Kun’s mind echoed brightly and briefly with the words _my partner_ in big bold font. “Well, alright then. She gave me her current address to send her mail along to, give me a moment to go grab it?”

Johnny’s posture relaxed. Kun resisted the urge to frown.

“Yes, of course, thank you!”

The old woman nodded and disappeared into her apartment, soft, sliding steps making light _pa-pa-pa_ sounds as she got further away.

Kun waited until he couldn’t hear her steps anymore to reach back and tap Johnny lightly on his wrist. He could feel Johnny’s eyes on him, but he kept his focus forward, cataloguing as much as he could of the elderly woman’s home.

 _Does something feel...a little off to you? About her?_ Kun asked over their connection, pushing away the initial double vision he got from accessing their digital link.

Johnny’s responding hum vibrated along Kun’s bones, dancing along his jaw and down his spine, tingling all the way to the tips of Kun’s fingers. _As off as any other elderly person living on their own tends to be. She approached us first, so, maybe a little nosy?_

Kun pressed his lips into a line, his instincts nagging him that that wasn’t quite it. _I don’t know, I don’t think it’s just that._ He sighed quietly through his nose. _Maybe I’m just imaging things_.

Johnny came to stand by him, their shoulders brushing, a sturdy presence that Kun had a frighteningly strong urge to lean towards.

 _If your senses are telling you there’s something wrong, it wouldn’t hurt to take a look into Ms. Han’s neighbors,_ Johnny said, brows drawing into a small, thoughtful frown the longer it took Han Meiling’s elderly neighbor to return. _Check to see if something_ is _actually wrong._

The relief Kun felt at not being brushed off was ridiculous, considering all Johnny had done was take him as seriously as someone of their positions should. And yet, it added to the rapidly growing list of cordial behavior Kun had experienced in the short amount of time they’d been put together on this case.

If he was being honest with himself, Johnny _not_ being aggressive with him was a core cause to why he was feeling so...unsettled. He couldn’t say that, though. How would it even sound? _“Hey, you being nice is weirding me out, stop it,”_ or, _“Everytime you behave like you socially should, it picks at old wounds I thought had finally healed over.”_

Neither were good. Neither would help. All options would only start a fight they didn’t need.

So, Kun breathed through his wandering thoughts, cramming them back into the boxes they’d crawled, forcing his mind back into the moment. The present where Johnny was looking at him for a response.

 _Yeah,_ Kun finally sent back, straightening up and taking a small step backwards when he heard the older woman’s slow steps returning. _Sounds like a plan._

“Here you go,” the old woman said as she rounded a corner inside the apartment and came back into view, holding out a small slip of paper that Kun waited till she was a proper distance to reach out and accept. “Please, let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.”

Kun took the paper, noticing the way the little old woman tapped her fingers over her clasped hand—a similar beat to what she’d been tapping out against the door—and smiled.

“Of course, ma’am. Thank you for your time today.”

01100101

They decided to wait until the weekend to try the new address they’d been given, looking it up and finding it to be a home nestled more towards the suburbs of the 7th under the name of a ‘Lee Jieun’.

In the meantime, they saw to other orders of business best taken on by ranked members of the bureau, namely beginning the process of speaking with the original case detectives.

On Johnny’s suggestion, they’d started with the 5th ward—since having the most amount of Dressmaker killings meant their case files should be the most informational. A higher number of murders in one of the less populated wards had to leave at least _some_ bits of proper evidence behind, after all. Even if it was something small the detectives at the time didn’t think was anything worth pursuing.

Kun drove, giving himself ample time to watch Johnny sleep from the corner of his eye during the relatively long trip necessary to reach the 5th ward from the 2nd. 

At around the two hour mark, Kun let the car’s onboard AI take over and guide them along the long stretches of highways and overpasses, settling in to flick through what info they’d been able to gather regarding the 5th ward detectives they were going to meet. He got through one, maybe two files—floating in a more strictly digital space, not bothering to craft an environment around him—before giving in and admitting that, _fuck_ , nothing new was sticking, the soft breathing of Johnny next to him proving to be more of a distraction than he could overcome with willpower alone.

So he sent the files back into the digital sea with a quick thought, and rose back into the present.

He wondered, briefly, staring at Johnny’s sleeping face, how the other man had fallen asleep so easily in Kun’s presence. Because, really, he’d nodded off almost immediately, relief having flickered through his eyes when Kun made the offer to drive this time. 

But, then he remembered that he’d fallen into a sort of sleep state himself when Johnny had been driving before, and he figured this wasn’t really all that odd. Or it shouldn’t be. Regardless of how their relationship had gone, they knew each other well enough.

Still, it filled Kun’s chest with a fragile sort of feeling, an emotion that would shatter and dissipate if he tried to analyze it head on, because Johnny looked so vulnerable like this: long limbs curled up as best as possible, slacks and button-up straining from the awkward pull his sleeping position put them through.

Kun couldn’t say he looked years younger in sleep—that wouldn’t be accurate, Johnny wore his years, and he wore them well—but he looked...softer? More open? No. He looked like how Kun remembered him from _before_. Before their fallout. Before the heartbreak.

He looked exhausted, bruises darkening the thin skin under his eyes, hair just that touch rumpled, like back when they used to spend long nights up studying. It made Kun wonder if he’d been having trouble sleeping.

Kun could, reluctantly, relate to that. He’d just picked up a few tricks from Ten over the years to hide the dark circles and keep every stray hair in immaculate place, crafting a picture of well-put-together instead of...well, whatever he actually was.

Tired. Angry. Worn thin. Living in the past.

Kun sighed, banishing that train of thought just as the car’s dashboard pinged with a distance alarm.

Kun dismissed it with a swipe of his fingers. _Almost there._

Next to him, Johnny stirred.

He uncurled himself from the position he’d rolled himself into, stretching his legs and arms as best as he could while Kun pretended not to watch.

“Are we there ‘lready?” Johnny asked, half-slurring while he rubbed sleep from his eyes.

“Not yet,” Kun said, determined to keep his eyes on the road ahead, reaching for the AI controls so he’d _have_ to focus on driving instead of the way Johnny was looking at him—soft from sleep and mildly confused.

Johnny stopped him by swatting Kun’s hands away with a low grunt, pulling up the police jackets Kun had been trying to go through earlier, instead.

Kun stared at his hand a beat too long before putting it safely back in his lap while the other went unnecessarily to the steering wheel, glad that Johnny didn’t seem to be awake enough to notice. His skin tingled where Johnny had touched him.

“Did you already go through all these?” he asked.

Kun shook his head, feeling tongue tied by the swirl of conflicting emotions rising like a storm in his chest, making it hard for him to breathe.

“Kun?”

Johnny was looking at him, leaning one of his elbows on the center console.

Kun forced himself to suck a lungful of air in, hoping it didn’t sound too much like a desperate gasp. _What the fuck is wrong with you, Qian?_

“No,” he managed. “Tried. Couldn’t focus.”

Johnny hummed. “Let’s go over them now?”

Another forced breath, only marginally easier than the last as Kun’s mind whirred, desperately trying to compartmentalize in order to properly function. “Sure.”

“Great.” Johnny nodded to himself, finally looking away, gaze no longer a heavy weight on Kun’s neck, the curve of his jaw, the lines of his face. _What the fuck?_ “Then, starting with Detective Kang Soohyuk.”

00100000

To say the detectives they talked to were happy about the situation at large would be a lie. A horrible, horrible lie.

The first pair they talked to—still on the job and practically seething with disdain—thought it was bullshit that their case had been handed off to two “government stooges”. They were both older than Kun and Johnny were, well into their fifties, and clearly thought Kun and Johnny were too young to be asking _anything_ of them.

It took everything Kun had to not let his temper flare up and lash out by the time they were driving over to the 23rd precinct to talk to the third detective—half of a pair, with his partner having transferred after the stress of the Dressmaker case.

“Fucking pricks,” Kun muttered under his breath, adding notes to the digital files they’d created on each of the previous detectives with quick flicks of his fingers; the word “asshole” appearing in smaller font behind an asterisk on both. “Care more about their pride and delicate fucking egos than catching a serial killer.”

Johnny sighed, scrubbing a tired hand over his face. He’d taken over driving this time, saying that he was worried about Kun’s temper, quote: “Getting them into an accident and leaving them for dead.”

 _As if crashing is that easy anymore_ , Kun internally grumbled.

There were lane sensors and safety features installed in both cars and roads specifically to keep them from swerving at the hands of a distracted driver.

“I can’t believe they asked if you were full cyborg,” Kun continued, “That shit’s fucking personal, they had no fucking right—”

“Kun.”

“—literally who the fuck are they to—”

“ _Kun_.”

Kun stopped, jumping a little in his seat, looking over at Johnny with wide eyes. 

“ _What?_ ” he asked. Snapped, really, a reflex to the harder edge Johnny had put into his tone.

Johnny shot him a look, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “Relax.”

“Excuse m—”

“ _Relax._ ”

Kun glared. Johnny glanced over again and let out another weary sigh.

“I thought you had a cooler head than this,” he said, tone neutral, though Kun still recoiled in hurt. “I’m not trying to pick a fight with you,” Johnny continued, quickly, seeming to sense Kun’s hackles rising, “but I don’t need you getting mad on my behalf.”

Kun tried to slow his angered breathing in the tense silence that fell over the car, turning to face forward, then, deciding that wasn’t enough, tilting himself so that he was looking out the window. He counted the road signs they passed, their holo-glow softer in the daytime than it was at night. When that didn’t ease the beating of his heart or distract him from the awkward atmosphere that had gone up in a snap, he changed tact, watching the sleek business sector buildings in the distance, covered in blinking advertisements, comparing them to the rundown apartment blocks closer to the roads.

He wanted to yell and fight, snap at Johnny until the other man gave in, until this suddenly cordial facade he’d put on broke.

But, he also knew that wasn’t fair. Johnny was trying. He’d been stepping back and keeping their interactions safe, tamping down on his own distaste to an extent that if Kun didn’t know him better, he’d say Johnny actually _liked_ him—to an extent.

“Haven’t seen you that mad at someone else in a while.”

Kun blinked, looking over his shoulder at Johnny without thinking. “Huh?”

Johnny was smiling, a small, fond looking little curl of his lips. “The last time was that trafficking case we crossed paths on, one? Two years ago?” Johnny huffed out a little laugh, clearly strolling through his own memories. “Usually it’s all directed at m—ah,” he paused, caught himself even though they both knew what he’d been about to say. “Anyway, it’s kinda refreshing.”

“You just said you didn’t need me getting mad on your behalf,” Kun said, trying desperately to fight down the flush eager to spread across his cheeks; telling himself it was from mortification of essentially being called out, _not_ from the spare compliment Johnny probably hadn’t meant to give or the smile playing across his lips.

Johnny shrugged, not looking at him. “Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it.”

Kun’s ears went warm. Instead of replying—what would he even _say?_ —he brought up the car’s dash panel, the pale blues, pinks, and yellows casting a soft light over them, and jabbed at the music player, letting the first station that came up drown them in the beginning notes of a crooning ballad.

Like that, Kun zoned out, thoughts drifting away on the soaring notes of lost love and broken hearts.

01111001

“You look ready to maul someone,” Yangyang chirped when they got back to the bureau late, _late_ into the night.

Kun spared him a narrow-eyed glare before sinking onto the couch that had mysteriously appeared in their squad room two days after they’d been assigned the case. Kun hadn’t asked questions and neither had Johnny, though Kun was ninety-percent sure the couch’s appearance had been a joint effort between their units with the way Yukhei, Chenle, Kunhang, Jisung, and Mark all went out for lunches together now. 

A beneficial bonding event that Kun was more than happy to turn a blind eye to—because he was pretty sure the couch came from one of the other departments, or the 5th floor breakroom—if it meant having a comfortable place to nap.

“It was a long day of getting insulted for nothing,” Kun groaned, the muscles in his back aching as the tension bled out of them in increments.

“The 5th was a bust?” Mark asked, looking up from his desk with a thinking frown, twirling a pen furiously between his fingers.

“Mm,” Kun nodded, eyes drifting closed, ready to give himself over to the warm embrace of sleep and a power nap before maybe looking through some of the evidence logs they’d gotten access to.

“No info or bad attitude?” Renjun asked, walking over to Kun with a warm, gently steaming mug held out for him. Kun blinked up at him, Renjun’s ears turning pink the longer Kun stared in confusion. “Tea.”

“For me?”

Across the room Sicheng and Johnny snorted. Only Johnny looked apologetic about it, quickly ducking his head and going back to the field notes he was logging on the less cluttered of their boards.

Renjun’s cheeks flushed the same delicate shade of his ears, and Kun became aware of the many sets of eyes watching—Donghyuck and Jaemin entering with bags of take-out from the 24/7 baozi place a few blocks away, Mark who’d stopped working and was staring with furrowed brows, and Yangyang, who was watching the whole room with a ready sort of calm.

“Um, yeah,” Renjun hesitated a little, “Unless you don’t want it?”

Kun pushed himself up with a grunt, half standing, quickly accepting the mug with eager, happy hands before it could be retracted. 

“I do, sorry, thank you, it was just,” he blew out a puff of air that fluttered his fringe, his hair having come down from how he’d styled it thanks to too many frustrated comb throughs with his fingers. “It was just a really long day.”

Renjun smiled, taking a sip from his own mug. “You said that already.”

Kun laughed, sitting back down and scalding his tongue on his tea. He looked up at Renjun, and then turned to the world at large. “Anyone here have better luck today?”

As a transition and an ice-breaker, the question worked wonders.

Kun, who’d been planning to get some rest, was suddenly the eye of a mini storm. Free tables were dragged over for the bags of food, and chairs were pulled up for all the people present. Paper files were dropped into the center of everything like party favors, passed around and flipped through as everyone took turns talking about any progress they’d managed to make.

As the rest of their team members trickled in, the impromptu table party grew, and over multiple cups of coffee and tea and more baozi and bread than Kun should’ve been eating at his age, they unwound and caught up.

Donghyuck and Dejun told them they thought they’d found more murders that could be attributed to the Dressmaker from the interim time between his sprees. They were more spread out, some of them crossing country borders, but they had reason to believe that they were all connected.

Kunhang said he was working on getting access to the logged memories from the victims’ cyberbrains—though, “Apparently some were corrupted, so it’ll be a bit of a struggle for us to reconstruct whatever we _do_ find.”

For what could still be considered the beginnings of an investigation, though, it was good. It was okay. Steps in the right direction, especially in regards to their teamwork.

Despite the animosity Johnny and Kun had fostered between each other, their units had come together well. _Johnny and_ _Kun_ had managed to work well together, even, a feat Kun honestly didn’t think would be possible.

They’d run into road bumps, but no walls, yet. They could do this. They _would_ do this.

Kun accepted an egg tart, held out to him by Johnny—almost like a peace offering, an olive branch—his expression open and honest. It was warm and perfect, and a curl of hope unfurled in Kun’s chest.

If Johnny could play nice, Kun decided, for the sake of their job and the success of this case, then he could do it too. Kun would take this temporary truce being offered to him and push back the past for now.

Johnny, watching Kun lick crumbs off his thumb with a look Kun couldn’t quite decipher, smiled when he noticed Kun looking back. Kun offered him a small, somewhat strained smile in return.

Kun could work with this. Kun _would_ work with this.

01101111

“Why am I coming with you again instead of tall, dark, and handsome?” Ten asked from the passenger seat, chair pushed back and curled like a shrimp so he could prop his feet up on the dashboard.

Kun sighed, again, flicking his eyes skyward in futile prayer, _again_ , before giving Ten a sideways glare. This was the sixth time Ten asked him that today in lieu of complaining, and the fourth time he brought up Johnny to get under Kun’s skin.

“You’re really not gonna stop, are you?”

Ten gave him a sugar-sweet little smile, “Nope.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“Because I like hearing you admit you need me,” Ten simpered, batting his lashes, “and I think it’s hilarious how your ears turn red when I bring up Johnny.”

“You’re such a fucking menace,” Kun grumbled.

“And yet,” Ten said with a dramatic flourish of his hand, “here I am.”

Kun sighed. “I told you already, the 5th was a bust, and the 1st wasn’t much better. So, Johnny and I are changing tacts.”

“I don’t see how much I’m gonna be able to help, though,” Ten said. “You told us all they had to offer were insults. I don’t get how me coming along is gonna change that.” Ten paused, tilting his chin up in thought. “Honestly, it’ll probably make things worse.”

Kun shrugged. “Depends how much of a threat they view you as. Who knows,” Kun turned them off the expressway, easing around an automated transport truck, “they might think you look so harmless they let down their security guards around you.”

Ten whipped his head around so fast, if he’d still been natural skin and bone he probably would’ve given himself whiplash.

“You want me to hack ‘em?”

 _Oh god_ , Kun thought. _He’s glittering_.

“Just some,” Kun winced, because Ten was gripping on to his arm now in excitement, a tad too strong for Kun’s still very natural skin, “light skimming. No deep hacks, Ten.”

“Emotional reads? To check for deception?”

Kun was regretting this plan already.

“Any strong emotions,” Kun said. “Just want to know if the detectives and ex-detectives we’re talking to actually don’t know anything, or if they’re hiding stuff from us. For example, in regards to the weird disappearances we’ve noticed popping up involving people from the past cases.”

“So,” Ten released Kun’s arm, bringing his fingers up to tap idly at his chin, “are they just frustrated at their own failure, or are they scared of something or possibly someone?”

“Please don’t actually _say_ any of those words out loud when we get to the precinct,” Kun begged, casting Ten a wary glance as he pulled them into the parking lot of the 3rd ward’s 10th precinct.

Ten laughed, the sound verging on a threatening cackle. 

“No promises,” he sing-songed, bouncing out of the car before Kun had even put it into park.

Kun didn’t typically resort to prayer, but in this moment he went down the list of every deity he could think of, names he vaguely remembered from his childhood silently whispered in the hopes that doing so would keep Ten from getting them kicked out—or worse, black-balled from any future police assistance.

 _It’ll be fine_ , Kun told himself, stepping out to join Ten as they strode through the precinct’s doors, Ten immediately taking to chatting up the front desk receptionist. _Yeah, it’ll be fine_.

Or not. The gods could choose to abandon Kun to the mercy of old detectives with major chips on their shoulders and a single large bone to pick with literally everyone.

 _What if_ , Ten sent through their link, only half an hour and an extensive list of pathetically annoying complaints later, _I leave a little virus in their systems that makes them cluck like a chicken whenever they want to talk shit_.

Kun sighed through his nose—keeping his strained smile intact as the detectives they were talking to went on and on and on—extremely tempted to say yes, but... _Focus, Ten_.

Ten’s sigh was internal, and loud, the sound reverberating with a digital overlay that nearly had Kun wincing at the volume.

 _You’re no fun_ , Ten huffed, smiling prettily at the detective who thought to add insult to injury by trying to hit on Ten while simultaneously complaining that they were “overstepping their bounds”. _And these guys have got nothing. Their all pomp and anger and irritation. Like human sized chihuahuas_.

Kun bit back a laugh. _I guess we could leave, then, try the other precinct, maybe we’ll have more luck there—_

 _Wait_ , Ten interrupted, _the guy hovering by the doorway, close cropped hair, full ‘borg_.

Kun saw him. He tried to put a name to a face from the precinct files he’d gone through, flicking through the data in his head until he landed on what he needed.

 _Shen Qunfeng, Detective First Grade_ , Kun listed out, _brought on as extra manpower during the first set of cases. Made grade during that time. Knew one of the victims_.

 _He wants to help,_ from the corner of Kun’s eye he saw Ten shudder, a small barely perceptible motion of discomfort. _His head’s kinda fuzzy feeling, I think his security barrier picked me up. I’m retreating, but he wants to talk to us so it should be fine_.

Kun nodded, a short, sharp movement that no one around them seemed to notice, the detectives they were talking to loudly bitching about the Sector Bureau now—as if all of them hadn’t applied at some point in their career and been rejected.

 _Didn’t feel like he was gonna approach us while we’re surrounded by all these guys, though_ , Ten added. _Come up for a reason for us to go outside. He’ll come to us_.

Trusting Ten’s judgement, Kun smiled politely and excused themselves, saying he had a call coming in that they both had to hear and apologizing profusely.

The detectives waved them off with jabs about being dogs on short leashes, going back to talking with each other—as they’d been doing before Ten and Kun had arrived.

The two of them made their way outside, back into the thick air of the muggy day, and waited. It took a bit—Ten crouched down to try and lure a cat he’d spotted ambling through a nearby set off hedges over, while Kun pulled out his beaten-up pack of cigarettes, picking one out and lighting it up–but, eventually, Shen Qunfeng was poking his head out of the precinct building, spotting them and coming over.

Kun saw him first, smiling in greeting. “Detective Shen, right?”

Detective Shen perked up at that, returning the smile and bobbing his head in affirmation, the motion a touch jerky. “Yes, um…”

Kun stepped forward, extending his hand, “Lieutenant Qian from Section 12, Major Crimes.”

“Right,” Detective Shen gave him a firm shake, picking idly at his shirt as the humidity hit. “You’ve taken over the Dressmaker case, then.”

Kun nodded, putting out his cigarette on the handrail behind him. “We have.”

Detective Shen fidgeted a little, his eyes maybe a bit too wide where they stared up at Kun, a little too eager; slightly off-putting but not enough of a reason to walk away. 

_Seems kinda jittery._

Ten snorted in his head, the sound sharp. _Don’t be mean, let him talk_.

Kun noticed him tapping out an erratic beat against his thigh, a tickle at the back of his head saying the rhythm was familiar. Before he could fixate, though, Detective Shen was speaking again.

“It’s a tough case, huh?”

Kun huffed out a wry laugh. “It is.”

“Never know when he’s gonna strike again. No solid evidence. Just dead girls and no leads.”

“You worked it.”

“Yeah,” the detective looked down, scuffing the toe of his shoe against the sidewalk. “It changes you, this case.”

Kun frowned, taking a step closer, trying to keep his tone consoling. “Oh? How so?”

“Your partner?” Detective Shen asked instead, looking over at Ten who was coming to join them.

“Uh, no. My second in command.”

Detective Shen nodded. “My partner at the time, Wang Xinyu, couldn't take the stress. Started to get paranoid. He ended up leaving once things ran cold.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Kun said.

Detective Shen shrugged. “Like I said, this case is tough.”

“You had something you wanted to tell us, when we were inside,” Ten cut in when it felt like the detective’s mind was drifting away into memories, his fingers picking up a quicker tempo where they were still tapping against his leg. “That’s why you came out here, right?”

Detective Shen rubbed a flustered hand over the nape of his neck. “Ah, yeah, sorry. You wanted to know if anything had stood out in the past cases, right?”

“Yes,” Kun said, feeling a kindle of hope spark in his chest, “Please. Anything would be appreciated right now.”

“Well, it’s not...concrete, but my partner at the time had a theory about the Dressmaker. Something about how he was pulling off killings in so many different districts without getting caught. He...well, he didn’t tell me what it was—that was around when a witness went missing and he started getting _really_ paranoid around people—but I’m sure he’d share it with you if you went to him,” Detective Shen offered them a wide, awkward smile, “He’d want to help.”

“Thank you, we appreciate it, really,” Kun said, Ten nodding along. “Here, let us give you our number so you can—”

Before he could finish talking, a notification pinged along their task force wide connection.

 _Can everyone hear me?_ It was Jeno, a gravity to his tone that had red flags raising in Kun’s head. _Another body’s been found in the 6th. Jaemin, Kunhang and I are heading out to the scene. We’ll share what we see when we get there._

 _Let us know if you need back-up of any kind, otherwise Ten and I will meet you at the morgue_ , Kun replied, jaw clenching, his stomach dropping. To the detective, who Kun for a second thought was looking at them with something critical before the expression was wiped clean from his face: “I’m sorry, we have to go. Another body’s been found.”

Detective Shen nodded in understanding, fingers stilling long enough to give Kun’s hand another jerky shake. “I understand. I hope you catch the bastard.”

Kun gave him a business card and a small, harried smile, already starting to walk to their car. “Thank you, we’ll contact you here first if anything comes up! We’ll be in touch!”

Ten drove, interfacing with the car to override some of its speed settings while Kun sank into the digital sphere, watching the crime scene through their teammates’ eyes once Jaemin, Jeno, and Kunhang arrived. 

He tried to focus on each vision screen, looking for anything that the Dressmaker missed in dropping the body, all the while idly flexing his hand, a low frequency tingle dancing on his skin, feeling like he was actively missing something major.

01110101

There was something morbid about going to see a survivor after having to do a notification for a recent victim.

It left Kun with a sour taste sitting thick on the back of his tongue, and a weight on his chest that he couldn’t shake.

It helped, marginally, that Johnny was with him—though that was a train of thought Kun didn’t want to pursue or poke at, for fear of what else might pop up.

“You could’ve stayed back,” Johnny said, carefully mild, eyes on the road as they made their way back to the 7th. “I could’ve brought one of the others t—”

“It’s fine,” Kun cut in, offering him a tight smile.

He regretted the edge to his tone immediately when he saw the muscles in Johnny’s arms flex, his hold on the steering wheel tighten. Kun was supposed to be trying to play nice, follow Johnny’s lead in professionalism for the purpose of getting the job done.

 _Don’t let him be the only one playing at being the bigger man_ , Kun reminded himself, taking a breath, flexing his hands where they rested on his thighs. _Do better. Be better_.

“We want her to know this case is being taken seriously, that her safety is paramount,” Kun said, trying for a gentler tone. “Besides, we were planning to ask for a memory share, right? I don’t suppose you’ve gotten any better at those since the academy, have you?”

Johnny blinked at him, looking a bit like a startled owl—though whether that was from Kun’s attempt at lightness or his willing mention of the past, he didn’t know.

“No,” he eventually said, an odd twinkle flickering through his eyes, regarding Kun with something indecipherable. “I still suck at it. Too heavy handed, or so Donghyuck says.”

Kun’s smile turned a touch more natural at that. “That’s one way of putting it.”

Johnny snorted softly. “You weren’t that much better.”

Kun poked his tongue against his cheek, testing to see if he felt a spike of anger at that; immensely pleased when all he felt was mild irritation. “I’ve _gotten_ much better, though.”

“Mm,” Johnny hummed, glancing at Kun from the corner of his eye, his mouth curling into a small smirk that reeked of challenge, “We’ll just have to see about that, won’t we?”

Kun felt his eyebrow twitch. “Guess we will.”

00100000

Lee Jieun’s home was much nicer than Han Meiling’s.

It was nestled into a suburb, close enough to the city that commuting for work wouldn’t be a hassle and a half, but far enough that it carried a feeling of safety with it. It was slotted in among other clean, white painted facades, with short wall fences blocking off the entrances and small patches of front lawn from the street.

“Cute,” Johnny said, looking up at the house as he climbed out of the car. “Looks like a home.”

“It does,” Kun agreed, unable to stop himself from smiling as a large chocolate lab bounded over to greet them at the small metal gate. He murmured sweet nothings to the dog—puppy? The paws were still big and its limbs gangly—raising a hand to press the comm button imbedded on the inwards portion of the low wall. When they got a tentative _“Hello?”_ in response Kun straightened up, patting his hands on his slacks. “Hi, yes, we’re from the Sector Bureau. We were hoping to speak with Ms. Han, if she’s in.”

There was a pause, Kun glancing over at Johnny. They hadn’t, Kun realized belatedly, taken into account the possibility that Han Meiling wouldn’t want to speak with them, or that perhaps the information her neighbor had given had been outdated.

Luckily, neither was the case.

_“W—what do you need?”_

A different voice this time. One softer, more nervous.

Kun looked around a little before spotting a guard camera. He patted his pockets for a moment, fishing out his ID and holding it up for the camera to see, offering it along with his most gentling smile. Johnny saw and quickly followed suit.

“It’s in regards to the Dressmaker murders, I’m afraid,” Kun said, “We were hoping you’d be willing to talk with us about that night.”

A pause, and then the intercom speaker was crackling back to life. _“I don’t like talking about that.”_

Kun nibbled on his lip, considering his answer carefully. “I understand, Ms. Han. We’ll leave, if you’d like, but we’d really appreciate any help you can offer. I,” Kun paused, “I’m sure you’ve seen the news. He’s killing again. We just want to stop him before more families, more girls, have to go through what you did.”

Another pause; this one longer than the last.

Then: _“Please, come in.”_

Kun breathed out a sigh of relief, wiping his sweaty palms against his legs, following Johnny through the little metal gate when they were buzzed in.

They were met at the door by Lee Jieun, ushered in and led to a small living room space where Han Meiling was already sitting on a well-worn faded green couch, picking at the fraying ends of her sweater.

She rose to greet them with a small bow, gesturing with a short sweep of her hand for Johnny and Kun to take the two mismatched chairs across from the couch. “Please, take a seat, would you like anything to drink? Water? Tea?”

“No, thank you,” Johnny said, giving the younger woman a gentle smile. “Ms. Han, I’m Lieutenant Seo, this is Lieutenant Qian, as we mentioned earlier we’re from the Sector Bureau and we’re the agents currently in charge of the Dressmaker case.”

“We apologize for interrupting your Saturday morning,” Kun continued, “but we just wanted to go over a few things with you, as part of our recanvasing.”

Meiling nodded, wringing her hands in her lap as her friend came to join her, sitting close and wrapping an arm around Meiling’s shoulders.

“I figured someone would eventually try and contact me about it,” she said, voice low but sweet. “I didn’t mean to be hard to find, but I—I just,” she breathed in, short and shaky, “After the newer murder in the 6th, I just didn’t feel safe on my own in my apartment. I’ve been living out here with Jieun since.”

“It’s safer here,” Jieun said with conviction, squeezing Meiling’s shoulder where her hand rested, pressing a kiss to Meiling’s temple.

Kun blinked. _Oh_. Clearly, Ms. Han’s neighbor hadn’t known the full scope of her relationship with her ‘friend’, because there was nothing but love in the two women’s eyes when they looked at each other.

It was endearing to see, but it also dug at something old and buried in Kun’s chest. A shapeless little thing wounded from his younger years with Johnny that had learned to hide its head in shadow.

Kun glanced over at Johnny, curious to see his reaction considering how _careful_ and _secretive_ he’d insisted their relationship—no, it was a lot but it was never quite _that_ —be. He was curious to see if Johnny’s expression had changed, if he’d been startled, if maybe, just maybe, he felt guilty.

Johnny was smiling softly.

He looked beautiful and at peace, smiling with so much fondness for the young women in front of them.

Kun felt such an intense rush of anger and hatred it almost bowled him over. How fucking unfair, he couldn’t help but think, that only he was left with these festering feelings and memories that he just _couldn’t fucking banish_.

But now wasn’t the time. Kun knew that. So he reigned himself in. Sealed the creature that wanted to bear its fang back into its cage far, far from the surface of Kun’s professional persona.

“It was a good idea to move in with Ms. Lee,” he said, “This predator prefers to go after girls on their own. Right now, there’s definitely safety in numbers.”

Meiling gave him a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, her brows slanted in an expression of worry and fear that was likely a constant in her life right now. “You didn’t come out here just to check on me, though, did you? I mean, it’s a far drive from the 2nd ward, isn’t it?”

“We _did_ want to check on you, make sure you were safe,” Johnny said, fond smile turning wry, “but you’re right, that’s not the only reason we’re here, I’m sorry.”

“That’s the second time you’ve apologized,” Jieun pointed out under her breath.

“Ji,” Meiling admonished.

“It’s all right,” Kun said, “What we came to ask for could be taxing on you. If you say no, we’ll understand, but we’re hoping you’ll say yes.”

“Say yes to what?” Jieun asked.

“To a memory share,” Johnny said. “The previous one you gave was corrupted during a hacking attack a year ago. It’s, well, it’s unusable. We were hoping you’d be willing to let us create a new file.”

Meiling had turned pale somewhere between “memory share” and “create a new one”, and Kun was becoming a bit concerned at the real possibility that she could faint during the process, even if she agreed.

Which she did, despite her girlfriend’s complaints.

“It’ll help?” She asked, voice gaining some strength where her body seemed ready to curl up and rest.

“We think so,” Kun said.

Meiling nodded, lips pressed into a determined line. “I’ll do it then.”

01110011

The memory share was done quickly, Kun synching up with Meiling, a wire connecting them, carefully creating a copy of her memories from the night she was almost abducted and saving it to his own drives.

Johnny accepted some tea from Jieun, chatting with her while the process was wrapping up to keep her from flitting around her girlfriend and accidentally distracting Kun. Once Kun was safely back in his own head, connection severed, he helped himself to some tea as well, trying to hydrate away the headache he felt building at the base of his skull.

“I hope that helps,” Meiling said when she saw them to the door, staring up at Kun, looking like a light breeze would blow her away if she wasn’t careful. “I hope you find something there the original detectives didn’t.”

Kun nodded, “I hope so, too. Here, my card,” he plucked out a simple bureau business card from behind his ID, handing it over to her, “in case anything comes up. _Anything_.”

Meiling smiled, taking the card. “Thank you, Lieutenant Qian, Lieutenant Seo, I—I appreciate it, really.”

Johnny returned the expression, bowing slightly in goodbye. “Of course, Ms. Han. Have a good day.”

They stepped outside and started down the lead-up stairs.

“Thank you—oh! Wait, I had one question!”

Johnny and Kun paused on the short path to the sidewalk, turning back in unison.

“Yes?” Kun asked.

“How’d you know where I was?”

“Ah, your neighbor, she gave us the address,” Kun explained. “She said she had it because you’d asked her to forward along your mail.”

Meiling frowned at that, taking an unconscious step back. “My neighbor?”

“A small, friendly elderly woman in apartment 1024,” Johnny said, a frown starting to draw down the corners of his lips, “Why? Is something wrong?”

“I—” Meiling bit her lip, taking another step back into the safety of her girlfriend’s home. “I did ask her to send along my mail, but she’s not—I mean, not to be rude, but Mrs. Kwon isn’t the nicest. We’d spoken to each other maybe once, twice before. It’s just...weird, that she’d be, well, helpful.”

Kun, frowning now too, shared a look with Johnny. “That’s good to know.”

“I mean, it’s probably nothing,” Meiling said quickly, retreating further behind the now partially closed front door. “Just. Odd.”

“Thank you for telling us,” Johnny said. He smiled, then, trying to ease the tension in the air with charm. _Like he always did best_. “It’s something for us to keep in mind.”

Meiling nodded, closing the door with a tentative wave, locking herself back into the safety of her current home.

“When we get back,” Kun started, sliding back into their car.

“Look up ‘Mrs. Kwon’?” Johnny finished. “Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.” 

01110100

Kun took it upon himself to go over Han Meiling’s memory file. He also split the work of looking into Mrs. Kwon and other case adjacent people who were reported as behaving strangely recently, figuring that, even if it didn’t pan out, it was better to err on the side of caution.

It meant him having to be at his desk for a few days on end, plugged in to the terminal there to sort through the memory file and other records, eyes flicking through bits of data at a speed he’d grown accustomed to over the years.

The work wasn’t the lightest. It put a strain on his neck, his back, his brain even—the level of focus and attention to detail necessary being what it was—but, it gave him the bit of distance he needed from Johnny. Because, as embarrassing as it was to admit (and he’d made that mistake, admitting it to Sicheng over drinks and getting breathlessly laughed at for it) he needed _distance_.

After talking to Ms. Han, Johnny and Kun had decided to quietly poke around and talk to the other tenants living on her floor, to see if they’d noticed anything odd about little old Mrs. Kwon’s behavior recently.

It had been a week of interviews, bringing some people back to the bureau with them because they didn’t feel comfortable talking to them at the apartment complex. A week of spiderwebbing out interactions and listening to people slowly explain their core concerns, realizing that there was an undercurrent of unease surrounding the old woman, now, that hadn’t been there even a few months prior.

It had been immensely productive, giving them something to look out for and look into.

But, it had also been a week of close contact with Johnny. A week of pretending things were suddenly okay. A week of playing nice when sometimes Kun just wanted to kick and scream and yell, _“What the fuck did you ever even see me as?”_

It was mystifying, honestly. Kun never thought Johnny being _nice_ would drive him mad _more_ than Johnny being an asshole.

“You’re thinking really loudly over there.”

Kun jumped, blinking out of his thoughts and the digital space he’d sunken into for the last hour, nearly yanking his connector cable out in the process.

“Fuck, you scared me,” he said, rubbing a hand over his chest, staring over at Dejun who had, apparently, made himself comfortable at the desk across from him at some point. “Where’d you even come from? I thought you’d gone to forensics with Yukhei to see about Moon Somin’s body.”

“I did, and now we’re back,” Dejun said with a cheeky grin, tilting his head towards where Yukhei was sitting with Mark and Donghyuck, talking intently over a glowing screen.

Kun craned his neck, as if that would somehow help him see what they were looking over. “Did they find anything?”

Dejun sighed, pushing a hand through his hair and reclining back in his seat the same dangerous way Ten liked to. “Nothing new. Same paralytic in her system, same type of blade used to make all the incisions, same scrambling of her cyberbrain, and still no fucking DNA.”

Kun muffled a frustrated groan into his hands, scrubbing them over his face. “Damn.”

“Yeah,” Dejun agreed, reaching out to pluck up a pen from his desk, twirling it between his fingers to give his hands something to do. “How ‘bout you? What were you looking through so intensely you didn’t even notice us come back?”

“The new memory file we got from Han Meiling, mostly,” Kun said, propping his elbow up on his desk and resting his chin in his hand, accepting this for the brief break it was. “I was going through some of the recent interview transcripts that you guys compiled also, though. Seems like there’s a trend with someone geographically close to people involved with the case behaving oddly recently.”

“You and Lieutenant Seo had mentioned something about that when you came back from talking to Ms. Han,” Dejun said, eyebrows furrowing in a way that sharpened the angles of his face. His “adult mode” Ten liked to call it, with all the familial fondness and teasing that came with being the younger man’s cousin. “Was that a thing with the previous killings?”

“Not sure,” Kun sighed. “We could never get anything off the victims’ cyberbrains, so we couldn’t back track from there. And it doesn’t look like friends and people who lived around them were asked about it at the time. Or, at the very least, didn’t have odd interactions of their own.” Kun puffed out a tired breath. “It’s one of the things Johnny and I want to ask about when we go to visit with former Detective Wang on Thursday.”

“Mm,” Dejun hummed, nodding along, watching Kun with sharp, knowing eyes. “How’s that going, by the way?” he asked, lowering his voice, “With Lieutenant Seo and all.”

Kun narrowed his eyes, feeling his neck prickle. “Fine,” he said, slow and wary, “How are things going for _you_ , working with him and his team?”

Dejun tried to cover up his snort with a cough, failing miserably. “Peachy. Yukhei and Yangyang have been fully adopted by them, so good luck getting them back when this is over. But, they’re nice. Lieutenant Seo, he’s, well,” Dejun paused, tilting his head as he considered his next words, “really nice, actually. He’s not really what I expected, you know, all things considered.”

Kun huffed out a weak laugh, the sound closer to a bitter scoff. “I—yeah. I know what you mean.”

01101001

Johnny had been everything to Kun, and maybe that had been the problem of it all.

Kun didn’t want to lose him, knew that pushing him—on what they were, what they were doing, where they stood with each other—would send him retreating behind false smiles and a friendly mask. But, with each day that passed, Johnny slipped away anyway.

Kun could see it. Tried to reach out.

He let Johnny fuck him in dark corners of unused academy classrooms, in the moonlit bunk of their dorm, in the showers after a long day. He let him take, and take, even as Johnny distanced himself during the day, making it clear to anyone looking that they were Friends with capital ‘F’.

It hurt, but Kun got it. The near miss and joking rumors had spooked Johnny badly, and just because Kun was comfortable with others knowing about them, didn’t mean he could force Johnny to be okay with it too.

So he let things go, and he let things build, shoved firmly under a rug until the silence between them, the tension and unasked questions, was the size of an elephant, ever-present and looming.

Kun smiled and waved, hoping against all hope things would be okay.

And then, one day—after weeks of Johnny slowly but surely distancing himself—Kun woke up in his dorm room, back aching from sleeping on the thin, cheap, plastic mattress and Johnny was gone.

“Seo?” the first cadet he could find asked, blinking through a yawn. “Dunno where he is, maybe he went for a run?”

Kun, an odd pain lancing through his chest to the beat of his heart, went to check the track. 

No Johnny. 

He checked the gym next, then the dining hall, even the showers. Nothing. No Johnny.

Kun’s heart lurched.

“Did you hear?” someone a few seats down from him in lecture said later that day, leaning over to whisper loudly to her friends, “Seo Youngho, from batch 29 got a transfer offer to a training program in the States.”

Kun, who hadn’t been fully listening up to that point, thoughts too fully consumed by Johnny’s disappearance, froze. 

“Shit, seriously? Johnny?”

“Yeah, isn’t that crazy?”

“Think he took it?”

Kun glanced to the empty seat next to him, the one Johnny would've been in. The one Johnny was _supposed_ to be in.

“I mean, wouldn’t you?”

Kun’s chest tightened. He couldn’t breathe. 

And then he blinked. 

Suddenly he was older, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, a blurry shape with a suggestion of a face.

He was stressed, though it was an emotion he was feeling through a haze. His heart was beating hard, his pulse drumming in his ears. 

Ten came to find him, his face crisper, the bold lines of the tattoos he’d gotten along with his new body peeking out from the collar of his button up: “Kun, it’s time, come on.”

Kun wasn’t ready. He felt like he was twenty-three again, just out of training and being assigned to his first unit. His hands were shaking, sweat dampening his neck and back.

“It’ll be fine,” Ten told him, dragging him down empty halls, their steps echoing across the sleek white tiles.

Kun disagreed. He felt like a guitar string wound too tight, one hard strum away from snapping with a dissonant chord.

He was about to find out if everything he’d been working towards was going to pay off. If his seven years of grinding under a team leader who’d lost respect for the job and the people around him was worth it.

Kun curled and uncurled his hand where it hung tense, suspended by Ten’s firm, stabilizing grip on his wrist.

The long hall came to an abrupt end at a pair of large doors made of polished wood. Rare, imposing, and all for show. There more for the ceremony of the moment than anything else.

Ten gave Kun a moment to properly collect himself before swinging the door open to a faceless crowd Kun’s mind was too scrambled to log in that moment. A sea of suits greeted them—men and women both—appraising Kun while wearing carefully put together masks of polite interest.

They were looking for faults. Kun could tell that much. And, even though he still felt raw inside over so many things—the hope he’d held, the love that got trampled, the fresh-faced idealism that he’d barely clung on to—he wasn’t going to give them _anything_ to dig their claws into on an outwards front.

He held his head high as he walked towards the front of the room, carrying with him the pride he should of being promoted to lieutenant at 30. He kept his back straight, chin up, and then…

...and then there was Johnny.

Tall, beautiful Johnny.

Kun almost stopped, almost tripped, his heart lurching up into his throat at the impossible sight in front of him.

Johnny couldn’t be here, _he couldn't_. And yet, and _fucking yet_.

He was looking at Kun, eyes widening, tracing him from head to toe. Johnny was smiling at him.

Kun’s ears were ringing. It felt like he _had_ stopped moving, even though he was standing by Johnny now, hands clenched into tight fists, nails digging hard into his palms.

Kun couldn’t hear, but he knew Johnny’s name was being called out and— 

“Section 7, International Crimes.”

Hah, haha. Kun’s heart was a pin-prick of pain. How many times had he and Johnny talked about what departments they wanted to work in, what divisions they wanted to lead? How many times had Kun said he wanted International Crimes for the scale that division got to work at? How many times? _How many fucking times?_

“Qian Kun, lieutenant, Section 12, Major Crimes.”

There was polite applause, Kun was sure of it. Somewhere in the crowd, Ten and Sicheng were cheering.

But for some reason, Kun _couldn’t fucking hear._

A light touch at his elbow. “Kun?”

 _That_ , Kun heard.

Johnny’s voice came through rich and deep, like the expensive whiskey Ten and Kun had chipped in and splurged on for end-of-case drinks.

Johnny was smiling again.

“Kun,” his eyes were soft, almost amber when they caught the light trickling in from the room’s windows. He looked fond, maybe a little nostalgic. What would be expected after reconnecting with an old friend, Kun supposed. Not sorry in the slightest. “God, it’s been so long. I worried when I couldn’t reach you for a while there.”

Kun felt like he was going to be sick. Anger and pain and the love that had been festering deep in the shadows of his mind were crawling forward with a determination Kun desperately wanted to stop.

He couldn’t lose it. Not here.

“You look good.”

Kun sucked in a sharp breath, the air not reaching his lungs.

Johnny’s touch at his elbow turned into a soft caress, a grab.

“Time’s been good to you, huh?” Said with a smile verging on a playful smirk. 

It was an expression Kun knew, one he remembered from nights spent tangled up in one another, Kun lured back again and again by gentle hands and a clever mouth.

Kun pulled his arm away. Took a step back. Johnny’s smile fell.

Kun wanted to scream.

“Kun.”

Kun shook his head, panic rising in his throat, watching Johnny’s expression crumple and then shutter.

That was familiar now too.

“ _Kun._ ”

Kun was shaking his head, his body, and he couldn't breathe, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn't—

“ _Kun, wake up._ ”

Kun shot up with a gasp, sucking down desperate lungfuls of air until he could make sense of where he was.

Johnny was looking up at him, eyes wide and startled where he was crouched by the tiny couch they’d dragged into their office space. He had two paper cups of tea in his hands, the warm herbal smell of the blend Kun liked from the little hole-in-the-wall down the street wafting up to greet him.

“I was sleeping,” Kun croaked out, voice rough from disuse. He couldn’t quite tell if it was a statement or question.

He shifted into a more comfortable seated position, trying to get his bearings, and a file went sliding from his lap, cascading down onto the floor, the papers inside gliding out with soft, mocking swishes. Still sleep-addled, Kun just stared at it.

“You were,” Johnny said, watching him. He bit his lip, eyes narrowing just a little, clearly mulling over his next words carefully. “Bad dream?”

 _You could say that_. “No,” Kun made a sound that was meant to be a laugh but came out more in the territory of ‘distressed whine’. “Why?”

Johnny searched his eyes, brows furrowing, creasing up the few worry lines he was forming. “No reason, I guess,” he offered up one of the to-go cups, “Here, it’s chrysanthemum, no sugar, exactly how you like it.”

Kun’s heart felt fragile, a wrung out sort of sadness sweeping through him as remnants of his dream overlaid on the Johnny by him now. He’d never wished more that their delicate peace—this silent agreement they’d come to in order to work together efficiently—would last. That it was real. That Johnny was back within arms reach, willing to talk and listen.

Kun took the tea and let the heat seeping into his skin ground him.

Johnny stood, fluid grace where Kun’s joints would’ve pop and groaned. The benefits of cybernetic prosthetics.

“You still up for doing a house visit with Wang Xinyu tomorrow?”

Right, tomorrow—today? What time was it even?— was Thursday. Kun nodded, taking a grateful sip from his tea, feeling the heat spread through his chest, his stomach, warming him from the inside out. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

Johnny nodded, pressed his lips in a line.

Kun sniffled, raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Nothing, just,” Johnny sighed, digging his hand into his pocket and coming up with a folded napkin, “Here.”

Kun took it and stared, feeling confused and still too drowsy to parse out why he was being given a napkin.

Johnny cleared his throat, gesturing vaguely to his own face. “For your, ah, cheeks.”

Kun frowned, bringing his fingertips up to press to his face and—ah. He didn’t even notice he’d been crying.

Johnny looked immensely uncomfortable, shifting nervously on his feet. “I’m gonna head out,” he said into the heavy silence.

Kun nodded, tracing his fingers up to his eyes, finding the skin there closer to wet than damp. “Okay.”

“Right, okay, well,” Johnny winced, pointing towards the door, “I’ll just…” He started to leave, pausing just at the little office’s threshold. He chanced a glance over his shoulder, half of his face caught in dark shadow. Even still, Kun could make something akin to sadness there. Melancholy, maybe? Either way, it made Kun ache. “Please go home and get some rest.”

Kun breathed in on a shaky inhale, letting out an even less steady exhale. “Goodnight, Johnny.”

“Goodnight, Kun.”

01101100

Former detective Wang Xinyu lived in an apartment block straddling the 3rd and 6th wards. It was well hidden amongst buildings of the same shape and design, bordering a river on its back end.

Johnny drove them there in mostly silence, putting on music—a station Kun used to listen to back in the academy dorm—and letting it run while Kun sunk into his mind to go over the points they wanted to discuss with Detective Wang. At least, that’s what Kun intended to do.

Instead, Kun’s mind wandered, safe in a digital bubble, floating amongst the soft glow of information screens and data tracks.

Kun felt like whatever fragile peace they’d silently come to an agreement on had been strained since Johnny found him sleeping in the office they’d agreed to share, waking him from a stressful dream that’d been much more memory than subconscious running wild.

It made Kun want to fold in on himself, knowing that Johnny had seen him cry; that desire made worse by the fact that Johnny had _looked_ at him when he’d picked him up from his apartment—bright and early, with a to-go bag of breakfast waiting—for this trek. _Really looked_ , like he used to when Kun was clamming up and shutting down from stress before an exam or physical test.

That, more than anything, is what had startled Kun, sending him skittering away into the safety of his mind’s space like a spooked foal.

Kun hoped Johnny didn’t notice; though he probably did. It made him feel weak, and embarrassed, words Ten had told him over beers one night years ago coming back to haunt him:

 _“Anger and hate and hurt can’t exist if you don’t care_. _Those aren’t the opposite of love. It means you still care, and that’s not a bad thing, Kun, it’s not a bad thing”_

But it _felt_ like a bad thing when it made Kun want to preemptively lash out in defense of old feelings that had grown rows of sharp teeth over time. When it made him want to hurt before _he_ could be hurt.

So Kun hid, curled in on himself until they reached their destination.

“Kinda nondescript, huh?” Johnny asked, the first full sentence he’d spoken to Kun since getting on the road—having been painfully respectful of Kun’s space.

Kun shrugged, picking at his shirt and bemoaning the need to wear a jacket on top for professionalism’s sake. “It’s sensible.”

Johnny snorted, falling in step beside Kun and matching his pace as they walked up to the building’s lobby, looking up at the matching buildings clustered together all the while.

“You _would_ say that.”

Kun felt his stomach swoop, an ache building along the back of his throat.

“Oh? And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Johnny said, his tone genial enough that Kun was wary but didn’t feel in the right to snap back just yet. They walked past the sliding doors and into the cool air of the lobby, Johnny shivering lightly in Kun’s periphery. “You were just always the type to choose practicality over comfort or luxury. I mean, the apartment complex you live in now isn’t much different than this.”

Kun pressed the button for the floor they needed and waited, crossing his arms over his chest.

“So?” Kun asked, reflexive hurt simmering down and annoyance beginning to bubble up.

“I—nothing, just—”

The elevator arrived and they piled in, the size of it forcing them to stand closer than Kun would have liked, their shoulders brushing, leaving Kun blazingly aware of the should-be obvious fact that Johnny still towered over him. He was still broad and big and smelling of sharp pine.

Johnny sighed, tipping his head back, combing a hand through his hair. “It’s just very you.”

Kun looked up at him, eyes narrowed, ready to ask what _that_ meant, when he noticed something that stopped him in his tracks.

Johnny had always flushed prettily, soft pink flooding his skin to different extents depending on the level and type of emotion. Arousal made his cheeks glow, anger made his neck burn, and embarrassment could turn his ears full red.

Right now, the whole shell of his ear was turning a lovely shade of bubble-gum pink.

01101100

Wang Xinyu welcomed them in with a nervous smile and hot tea, dressed comfortably in loose pants and a polo shirt.

“I always knew the bastard would be back,” he sighed, idly rotating his cup of tea on the little kitchenette table they’d gathered at—Mr. Wang on one side, Kun and Johnny folded in on the other—unable to hold still. “These types of killers don’t stop until they’re caught.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Kun said, sipping politely at his tea. “We were hoping you’d be able to answer a few questions we have.”

Mr. Wang nodded. “I figured as much. What would you boys like to know?”

“We were wondering if anything ever stood out in the original witness interviews, or in your canvasing,” Johnny said, “Anything...odd.”

Mr. Wang pursed his lips, crossing his arms in thought, knee bouncing. “The only thing odd I remember about the canvasing, was that there wasn’t anyone out of place.”

Kun frowned. “What do you mean?”

“No one in the girls’ neighborhoods or buildings ever noticed anyone that didn’t belong. No new faces suddenly popping up, even though everything about the Dressmaker’s profile suggests a predator that watches his intended victims for weeks sometimes before grabbing them.”

That _was_ odd, and a trend that had seemed to carry over into the Dressmaker’s recent killings.

“When you were talking to people, did anyone happen to mention someone they knew suddenly acting strange?” Johnny asked, leaning forward in his chair, the wood creaking under him, “Or, maybe not behaving like themselves?”

Mr. Wang turned to him, a pensive expression flashing across his weathered face.

“The younger sister of one of the murdered girls said that the owner of the neighborhood market was ‘wrong’. She was, eight or nine at the time, so no one put much stock in what she said, but she looked scared.”

Kun felt a chill roll down his spine. “Did anyone else report something similar?”

Mr. Wang stood abruptly, leaving the kitchenette and heading towards the small office space Kun had noticed when they’d first come in. He was trying to decide if they should get up and follow when Mr. Wang returned, a yellowed file in hand.

He flipped through it with quick swipes before eventually closing it with a disgruntled sigh.

“I’d made a list of the people who’d been insistent about a neighbor or colleague near them ‘not being themselves’ in the time leading up to and after the murders,” he told them, “None of the other detectives working on the case at the time put any weight in it, waving it off as just the normal type of crazy and paranoia that comes with a shocking event.”

“But you didn’t think so,” Johnny surmised.

“It was too many people saying similar things,” Mr. Wang said, inflection rising at the end. He made an effort to calm himself, inhaling long and slow, letting it out in a controlled stream. “And it linked up with a theory I’d been working on at the time, to explain how so many murders could happen in so many different wards without any records of a single suspect traveling to each.”

“A theory?” Kun prompted. “What type of theory, if you don’t mind me asking, Mr. Wang.”

Mr. Wang cleared his throat. “I suggested the possibility that the Dressmaker was utilizing multiple bodies somehow.”

“That,” Kun started, a feeling of unease creeping up on him.

“Would be very bad,” Johnny finished.

“It would be,” Mr. Wang agreed, tone grave.

“Why didn’t that ever make it into any file notes?” Kun asked.

Mr. Wang shrugged, picking at his pants. “The scope of control a single cyberbrain and its ghost had at the time was more limited, we didn’t see all the cases, then, of remote body control that have popped up recently,” he paused, grimaced, “Though it didn’t help that my partner at the time used to call me a paranoid old man. Said my idea was ridiculous.”

Kun and Johnny both sat up straight at that—Johnny’s knee accidentally slamming into the underside of the kitchenette table, almost sending their tea cups tumbling.

“He did?” Johnny asked.

Mr. Wang grunted. “The little upstart hated being paired with an older detective. A hotshot at twenty-five. We never quite managed to get along.”

“That’s...interesting,” Kun said, mind whirring, trying to figure out what this meant and becoming rapidly concerned about what it _could_ mean, “since he’s the one who suggested we come and speak with you.”

“Huh,” Mr. Wang frowned. “Well, maybe the kid’s finally gained some sense.”

01101001

“I mean,” Donghyuck started, mouth still full of dan dan noodles, cheeks bulging like a chipmunk preparing for the winter, “it tracks.”

“How?” Renjun demanded, his own chopsticks poised over one of the containers of gyoza while he talked. “It’s hard enough to switch between two or three bodies at any point in time, let alone actively control, what, six? Assuming the Dressmaker has at least one in each ward he’s killed in.”

“Yeah,” Donghyuck conceded, swallowing and then immediately swiping a bite of chicken off of Kunhang’s plate, ignoring the following whine, “but it still tracks.” He stuffed the chicken in his mouth, chewing vigorously enough Kun was honestly worried he’d chomp on his tongue or choke. “I mean, to avoid camera detection and fuck with cyberbrain tech—which our psymechs go to _college_ to learn how to do—already requires a high level of skill. It’s not _that_ farfetched to think that someone with that knowledge would be able to control multiple bodies at once.”

“The damage it would do to the mind, to a person’s ghost, though,” Dejun winced, helping himself to more congee from the smorgasbord laid out on their squad room’s impromptu dining table, “You’d lose your sense of self. You’d fracture.”

“But,” Johnny said, making Kun flinch—because somehow he’d forgotten that, out of all places, Johnny had plopped down in the seat _right next to him_ , “it _is_ possible?”

“It is,” Sicheng said. “We’ve seen it in cases before.”

Kun’s team nodded in discomfited agreement. 

“A guy split himself over five bodies,” Ten said, chasing a grain of rice around his plate with one of his chopsticks. “His original body was a drooling mess when we found him. The psymechs that took a look at him said he’d overextended and been unable to drag his mind back.”

“You have to have an incredibly strong sense of self to manipulate multiple bodies,” Yukhei added, “That being said, though, whoever the Dressmaker is has gotta be fractured.”

“A killer with a broken mind,” Kun sighed, balling up the napkin he’d been ripping bits off of, tossing it at his now-empty plate, a headache already starting to fizzle at the base of his skull, “Just what we need.”

00100000

Thinking about hijacked bodies, odd behavior, and witnesses who’d abruptly up and vanished—Ms. Han’s neighbor and Detective Shen at the forefront of his mind—Kun made the split decision to go visit Wang Xinyu again.

The weather was breezier than it had been in a while, the oppressive heat of summer slowly giving way to the slightly cooler, but still damp, air of fall. Kun had to pull his jacket tighter around his body as he made his way into Mr. Wang’s apartment building, shivering against the chill attempting to settle deep into his bones. 

“ _An omen,_ ” Dejun would say if he was here.

Kun wasn’t nearly as superstitious, but it did put him on edge.

“Lieutenant Qian,” Mr. Wang greeted when he opened the door, smiling wide enough for his eyes to curve, “Good to see you again, what can I help you with?”

“Hi, Mr. Wang I was hoping I could ask you a few more things about your theory on the Dressmaker,” Kun said, smiling back at a lower wattage, “Maybe see if you had any luck finding that list of names you’d made.”

“Oh, of course, come on in.”

He stepped aside for Kun to enter, closing and locking the door behind him.

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Wang started, guiding Kun to his living room space this time, gesturing for him to take a seat on the old, patterned couch, “I haven’t been able to find the list. I did start to try jotting it down again, though. Detective Shen has been helping me’’ actually.”

“Detective Shen?” Kun asked, surprised and a bit concerned. “I thought you two hadn’t spoken in a while.

 _I thought he was behaving strange_.

“We hadn’t but he called me up a few days after I spoke with you and Lieutenant Seo,” Mr. Wang said, moving at a much more sedate pace than he had the last time they’d met. He sat in an armchair that looked like it’d seen better days, hands resting along the armrests. “He said he wanted to apologize and we ended up talking about the case.”

Kun resisted the urge to frown, keeping his cordial smile in place. “How did he seem when you spoke to him, then?”

“Like he’d finally grown up,” Mr. Wang laughed.

“So he seemed...fine?” Kun asked.

“A little stressed, more humble, but fine,” Mr. Wang said, tilting his head to the side, fingers twitching out a sporadic rhythm over the faded cloth of the armchair. “Why do you ask?”

Kun pressed his lips into a line, thinking. “No reason, sir. You mentioned you’d recovered some of the names off your list, if I could—”

Before Kun could finish that sentence, his phone went off.

“Sorry,” he said, standing to fish the slim device out of his pocket, frowning because if it were someone on his team they’d contact through their link. He stepped away so he was closer to the door, turning his back on the room for the illusion of privacy. “Hello?”

“ _Lieutenant Qian?_ ”

Kun’s frown deepened, the voice on the line sounding urgent. “Yes?”

“ _This—this is Lee Jieun, I—I’m sorry for calling, b—but I didn’t know who else to go to, it’s about Meiling._ ”

Kun felt all his blood drain from his face, his pulse rushing loud in his ears. “Did something happen? Is she okay?”

Jieun let out a harsh, dry sob, her end of the line bursting with a fizzle of static. “ _I—I don’t_ know _. She went back to her apartment to pick something up by herself and hasn’t come back. I_ told _her I’d go with but—_ ” another broken sound, “ _She didn’t wait._ ”

“Okay,” Kun said, wrangling his tone into something that hopefully came across as calming and reassuring, burying the dread that was filling up his throat for the sake of the younger girl on the other end of the line. “Okay, Ms. Lee—Jieun—if there someone you can be with right now? Family? Friends? Anyone who can keep you company?” 

She answered with a sniffle and a watery, _“Yes.”_

“I need you to call them up, then Jieun. We’ll find Meiling for you, but you shouldn’t be alone right now either.”

_“Okay. Lieutenant I—please, she’s already survived so much, please find her.”_

Kun turned back to Mr. Wang once he’d hung up, mind already racing, sending a message out to both units and Johnny, alerting them to the situation. He was distracted enough—worried enough—that he almost missed the bright gleam in Mr. Wang’s eyes, a stark contrast to his otherwise neutral expression.

“I’m sorry, but something’s come up—”

“With the case?”

“Yes,” Kun said, walking back over to grab his jacket, throwing it on, “It’s a bit of an emergency. I’m sorry, even though I was the one who came to bother you…”

Mr. Wang waved him off, the motion just a touch stiff, like his arm didn’t quite want to listen. Kun wondered absently if the older man was actually in a cyborg body—it wasn’t unheard of, for people to choose to look their age; keeping the visual but ditching the frailty.

“I understand. I feel bad that you drove all the way out here only to leave empty handed, though,” he said. “If you can spare a moment, you can take a memory bundle from when I was working on the case.”

Kun hesitated, checked the time on his phone. He should go. Han Meiling disappearing was more important than fishing for a list of names he could get later. But…

“If you’re okay with that, sir, then I’d appreciate it.”

Mr. Wang had felt just that bit off since he arrived. This would be a chance to take a peek through his head, to confirm or disprove the roiling sense of _‘wrong’_ sloshing around his gut.

Kun connected a port cable to Mr. Wang’s panel and dove in. He focused on the sensation of being in the older man’s head, trying to compare it to searching through Han Meiling’s memories as a baseline. It felt a bit like he was walking through knee-deep water when he strayed from the digital memory path available to him.

It put more of a strain on him, his head aching duly—though that very easily could’ve been Mr. Wang’s police-grade defence barrier sensing a foreign entity and going after it, like an immune system response. The strain was enough that after a few quick attempts of trying to peer through Mr. Wang’s recent meeting with Detective Shen, Kun had to give up, taking the bundle of memories he’d been coming for and exiting with a sharper snap back into his own head than he was used to.

“Thank you,” Kun said, blinking through the burst of white noise _shhhh_ -ing in his ears; an uncommon reaction to a permitted connection, but not entirely unheard of when a defence barrier is involved. He rolled out his neck and stood, the fizzling start of a headache turning up to a crackling pressure. A lot of discomfort for not _really_ getting the answers he wanted. “I appreciate the continued help.”

“Of course,” Mr. Wang said, smiling. “It’s my pleasure.”

01101100

Searching for Meiling leads them to discover that Mrs. Kwon had disappeared too.

There were no signs of a struggle, no evidence that either had been taken against their will. Not that that meant much when there had never been evidence of a struggle on any of the Dressmaker’s victims, their fried minds and missing skin the only signs of physical damage.

They canvassed the area, scanned through footage from the dodgy camera set into the building’s lobby ceiling, and checked street cams.

The most that gave them is that Meiling left with Mrs. Kwon, seemingly willingly.

Three days passed, four, five, one week, two.

When another girl went missing—a different ward, but same general build, age, and natural skin—Johnny suggested posting a security detail on Lee Jieun.

“Just to be safe.”

Kun wasn’t about to argue with that.

They kept searching, kept hunting, looking for anything, _anything,_ that would lead them to the Dressmaker. Something to tip them in the right direction.

Kun’s headache from his visit to Mr. Wang faded but didn’t ever quite go away, raging to the forefront in moments of exhaustion.

Kun felt like he was living in a constant state of exhaustion, nights spent at the bureau becoming more and more common for all of them. Needless to say, the pain got worse.

01101111

They found Mrs. Kwon’s body, seemingly untouched but cold in death, a month after her and Meiling’s initial disappearance.

The media—already whipped into a frenzy over Meiling, the only Dressmaker survivor, being likely taken again—hit a new fever pitch, speculations flying about when Meiling or the other young girl the Dressmaker had taken, a college 3rd year named Joo Ahreum, would pop up next.

It was vulgar and cruel and wholly inconsiderate of the family and loved ones concerned about the missing girls.

“They’re fucking vultures,” Kun complained, making the drive out to Wang Xinyu’s apartment again, Renjun in the passenger seat.

They were going to bring the old, former detective in to properly question him, the memory bundle he’d given Kun having been carefully blurred out in all the important places. Purposeful, and enough to bring him in on obstruction of justice.

Kun’s grip on the steering wheel tightened. “Morbid fucking bastards are licking their lips, hoping they get a good headline out of all this.”

“Doesn’t help that half of the news outlets are turning this back on us,” Renjun sighed, slouched down in his seat.

He had dark circles pressed into the skin under his eyes, dark hair hanging limp over his forehead. Like most of the team, Renjun had stopped putting in much effort beyond showers and changing into clean clothes when he rotated home to sleep in an actual bed.

“No,” Kun agreed, some of the fight leaving him at how drained the younger man looked. “Has your team ever worked something like this before?”

Renjun shook his head, gaze fixed somewhere out the window, watching the scenery zoom by. “We’ve worked serial cases before, a lot of kidnappings for ransom, but nothing like this.” He turned his head enough to glance over at Kun, his left eye going a reflective green as the sun hit it at an angle. “You guys?”

“We worked something similar three years back,” Kun said. “It wasn’t to this scale, but it was brutal.”

“The killings or the work?” Renjun asked.

“Both.” Kun clicked off the news, flicking through the music stations instead until he found one playing a smooth R&B song. “Learned that you have to rest, even if it feels like you should always be working. You can’t help anyone if you burn out, after all.”

Renjun snorted under his breath, a lopsided smile twitching up the corner of his mouth, youthful and sweet. “Are you trying to say something?”

Kun felt a smile pulling at his own lips in response to the younger man’s playful tone. “That if you sleep in the squad room again tonight I’m having Ten send you home whether you want to or not.”

“A little hypocritical considering you and Johnny pulled futon mattresses into your office, complete with bedding and everything.”

Kun shrugged. “We’re the team leaders. It’s expected we take the brunt of things.”

Renjun laughed, the sound always deeper than Kun would expect from a man who had to be 170 cm, max.

“You know, you’re a lot nicer than I thought you’d be,” he said, eyes curved up into friendly crescents. “Johnny was right.”

Kun stared, stunned into silence, the question _“What does that mean?”_ on the tip of his tongue.

But Renjun turned up the music, then, singing along to the soft pop song playing, and Kun lost his chance to ask.

01110110

It turned out they wouldn’t be questioning Wang Xinyu at all.

When they reached his apartment, the door was ajar, and when they pushed in, guns drawn and on high alert, it was to find the older man dead.

His body was slumped against the wall directly across from the entryway, the first thing you’d see walking in. There was blood dripping from his nose where his cyberbrain had been shorted, his abdomen a mess where he’d been brutally stabbed multiple times, blood and bits of gore spilling out around him.

A single word had been written above his drooping head on the wall, Kun’s ears ringing as he read it.

_Hello : )_

“Fuck,” Kun breathed, registering Renjun calling in uniforms to seal off the scene and CSU to begin processing it, but not actually hearing him.

The fuzzy pressure in his head that felt like a constant now spiked all at once, making Kun grit his teeth in pain and frustration.

“ _Fuck._ ”

01100101

Three days later, Han Meiling and Joo Ahreum’s bodies were found.

Kun and Johnny took the task of notifying Jieun.

Kun felt a bit like his chest was caving in, hearing the younger woman cry.

“I hate this,” he whispered harshly to Johnny afterwards, back at the bureau, standing out in the open-air smoking area as he puffed out smoke like a slumbering dragon, hoping the cigarette would calm him.

His head was hurting him more often than not, lately. He knew he should get it checked out, even if it turned out to be something like stress related migraines—something he ultimately wouldn’t be able to do much about.

“I know,” Johnny said, somber and tired, leaning on the terrace-like area’s guard rails. 

He pulled out a cigarette of his own, leaning in close to Kun to bum a light off him. Kun, a scratchy irritation clawing at his back, his neck, the inside of his skull, mirrored the action without thinking, offering up the lit end of his cigarette for Johnny to use.

Johnny hesitated for only a moment, eyes flashing with something unfamiliar but oddly reminiscent of hope before accepting, leaning back out of Kun’s space when he had a burn going.

“It’s not going to get any easier,” he said, voice low and warning.

Kun bit down on the sneer that wanted to curl his lip. He didn’t need that tone from Johnny, as if he hadn’t spent just as much time in the same career. “I know.”

00100000

Kun felt like a wind-up toy poised to go off.

There was a near constant coil of stress in his chest, the pressure at the base of his skull coming and going in stronger and stronger waves the less rest Kun got.

He swore he could hear the crackle of it in his ears. A fuzzy pop and whine that left him reeling at times, pain lancing through from his ear canal down to his jaw.

“You should go to a doctor,” Ten said in concern, the only one besides Sicheng and Johnny who was willing to approach Kun when he was being snappy—something that was happening more and more frequently as of late. “Or check-in with the psymechs.”

“I don’t have the time right now,” Kun muttered, feeling a brash sort of annoyance build up in his throat, making him want to lash out where he knew he shouldn’t. “You know that. I’ll go after.”

“After what?” Ten asked, eyes narrowing and eyebrows furrowing. “After you finish going over those reports, or sifting through the same files and footage we’ve all been combing through? Or after the case?”

“Just,” Kun waved his hand in the air, pain in his head peaking with a buzz that just _wouldn’t go away_ , “ _After_.”

“You shouldn’t put it off,” Johnny chided from over at his desk, frowning at the holo-screen he was working on. “Ignoring your health isn’t gonna help you work better.”

Kun felt something inside himself snap. When he spoke, it was with a dangerous type of calm. “What I do or don’t do regarding my health isn’t really any of your business, is it, Seo?”

The silence that followed was loud.

A muscle in Johnny’s jaw jumped as he pressed his eyes closed, his next breath in a slow, physical thing. No one said anything, watching to see if things would simmer down or if they’d need to intervene.

“Sure,” he said, voice tight, turning at the desk he’d taken up to stare Kun down, “Fine. But you can’t go around telling everyone else to take breaks and not do the same yourself, right now. You haven’t gone home to sleep properly in _days_ , Kun. You need to rest and look after yourself.”

There was a click, a brief burst in Kun’s head, and a moment where he sensed something bad was about to happen with no way to stop it.

He opened his mouth, feeling a disconnect in action and thought, and said, clearly, crisply: “Fuck you.”

Johnny went still, eyes widening a fraction before narrowing down into dangerous slits. “Excuse me?”

Kun laughed, a manic sound that distressed him more than anything. “I said: Fuck. You.” A giggle, the sound out of his mouth before he could stop it. “Don’t you get it? I’m not _you_ , Johnny. I’m not the bureau’s golden boy. I don’t get to take breaks, _ah!_ ” A sharp pain lanced through his head, pulsing behind his eyes. Kun breathed through it, a train rumbling off its rails at full speed. “I don’t—I don’t get to _rest_. That’s, hah, that’s not how it’s _worked for me_.”

“You—” 

Kun rose up to unsteady feet, feeling wild, mouth running with no way to _stop_.

He almost sobbed, or maybe he did. There was white noise rushing in his ears, loud and constant and painful. Fuck he was in pain. 

“You—you,” Kun pushed out, not even knowing what was going to be said, vaguely aware of everyone’s horrified attention on him. “You don’t get to—to tell me to—to rest.” He gasped, nearly doubled over, and suddenly hands were catching him, pulling him up. His vision blinked, in and out, the reality of their squad room one second, and his lobby—warped and heat distorted—the next. “N—not when you—you’ve in—interfered on c—cases, f—forcing us to—to work t—ten times h—harder.”

 _Stop, stop, stop,_ Kun practically begged himself, feeling hot tears escaped down his cheeks. _Please stop_.

A wave of nausea hit, a result from the pain, and he almost upchucked what little he’d had for lunch.

It was late to fully and finally acknowledge, but something was horribly, horribly wrong. Kun felt like he was going to die.

His head felt like it was being stretched and folded, his defence barriers straining to the point of snapping one after the other. 

_A hacking_ , Kun belatedly realized, breathing hard through his mouth, his senses shot. _I’m being hacked_.

The sense of falling, maybe his knees hitting the floor. Startled, muffled shouts around him. Ten’s and Sicheng’s and...was that Johnny?

Kun smiled. Or, at least he thought he did. He couldn’t tell anymore, a sharp buzzing traveling up his spine making his muscles tighten.

“ _Kun!_ ”

The ghost sensation of big, safe hands cupping his face.

_Johnny?_

And then the buzz reached the base of his skull with a _zap_ , and everything went black.

01111001

Kun woke up in stages.

First, he noticed the soft sounds of light snoring and the gentle hum of the air conditioning. Then, he picked up the low ambient sounds of people talking in hushed tones outside the room, muted footsteps and the quiet squeaks of wheels rolling over linoleum. The next thing was the smell of the room: the telltale scent of strong antiseptics and bleach. The blend of which was distinctly _hospital._

The dull, thudding headache and all-body soreness came next, making Kun viscerally aware that he was here, alive, fine. Whatever had happened—it had felt like a hacking attempt gone wrong, a virus expansion that didn’t account for the defense barriers the bureau’s psymechs put in place—hadn’t fried his brain. It hadn’t killed him.

And then, lastly, there was a hand; curled warm and firm around his own.

It dwarfed his, engulfing it completely, and Kun felt his heart race. The rough calluses were gone, not having crossed over to the prosthetics—the skin smoother than it ever had been—but the little scar curving along the meat of the palm from an old training accident had been kept.

Kun traced it, now, with small twitches of his finger, the pressure of tired tears burning at the back of his eyes.

He knew this hand, almost better than his own.

“Johnny,” Kun croaked into the stale, recycled air.

“Oh shit,” there was a low clatter and suddenly Chenle’s fresh face was popping into Kun’s field of vision. Relief swept over his features as he turned to speak to someone over his shoulder in muted, but not quite hushed, tones, “Lieutenant Qian is up!”

“Keep your voice down, Chenle,” Mark hissed out of sight.

Kun tried to turn his head, groaning at the deep muscle ache that resulted from the attempt. He was rewarded for his efforts, though, with a better view of the room he was in and Mark yanking Chenle back by the neck of his jacket. There was a flutter of movement and then Ten was at Kun’s bedside, hair and clothes sleep-rumpled, eyes glittering with unshed tears.

“You,” Ten combed his hands through Kun’s hair, placed one at Kun’s cheek, brow crumpling, “You— _you fucker_. Don’t you fucking _dare_ scare us like that again.”

“Didn’ do it on purpose,” Kun grumbled, throat and mouth almost painfully dry. “Pass me some water?”

Ten huffed out a fond noise, rolling his eyes at Kun in a display of irritation that was entirely unconvincing, looking around for what Kun asked.

“I don’t see any,” Ten said, frowning, sniffling. “I think we drank it all. We didn’t really expect you to wake up so soon. Doctors all said you’d be out for at least three days and it’s only been one and a half.”

Kun processed that information, a spike of distress flaring up at the time he’d lost, a bright and painful star flaring to life in his chest.

“Were you guys here the whole time?” Kun asked, frowning at the thought of their case languishing just because he was in the hospital.

“Most of us, no,” Mark said, laughing a little at the relief that Kun knew was showing on his face, “but...” and here he trailed off, looking across the bed, to Kun’s right—where his hand was warm and a weight was pressing down the mattress by his thigh. 

“ _He_ hasn’t left,” Ten finished.

Kun didn’t want to look. A weak part of him didn’t want to see Johnny there, at his side, holding his hand in whatever state of disarray he was in from spending more than a day in a hospital room watching over Kun’s prone form. But, an even weaker part of him—the one that had been surfacing more and more often these days, still carrying old wounds with a dangerous brand of fresh hope—wanted to confirm what his sense of touch was telling him was real.

“He looks so tired,” Kun mumbled, heart feeling raw as he turned to watch Johnny sleep by his side. His fingers itched to card through the mess Johnny’s hair had become, to smooth down the crinkle between his brows, ease up the tension he saw lining his jaw. “Did he sleep at all before this?”

Ten’s hand, now resting on Kun’s shoulder, gave him a squeeze. Mark and Chenle, standing a bit back and off to the side, exchanged glances.

Mark cleared his throat. “He, uh, wanted to be up in case you came-to earlier than expected. Didn’t fall asleep until Ten made him agree to a nap in exchange for us staying to wake him up if, um, anything happened.”

Kun made a small noise in the back of his throat, unable to pull his eyes away from the man sleeping at his side.

The room fell into a silence then, not quite awkward, but not quite relaxed either, until Ten turned to the two younger men and nudged Mark with his elbow.

“Hey,” Ten started, smiling sweetly at Mark and Chenle. “Think you could go let everyone else know Kun’s awake? Maybe get us some water, or find us a nurse while you’re at it?”

Mark blinked at him for a second before seeming to get what was actually being asked of him, Chenle pouting in a way that said that _he_ didn’t and was just about ready to refuse.

“Oh, yeah, yeah of course.” Mark got a firm hold on Chenle’s arm and shoulder, using the strength of his cybernetic left arm to leverage Chenle towards the door. Chenle looked ready to argue, already saying that he wanted to stay with Kun, so Mark tightened his grip. “We’ll link up and send out a message. Let us know when,” he let go of Chenle’s arm to wave his hand in the air, “you know.”

Ten snorted.

Mark gave a short nod to Kun, smiling as he shoved a whining Chenle out the door and into the hall. “I’m glad you’re okay, Lieutenant Qian. You really scared us back there.”

“Thank you, Mark,” Kun said, voice struggling to climb past a dry rasp.

Another bobbing nod, and then Mark was closing the door behind them, plunging the room back into a humming silence.

“It was terrifying, you know,” Ten said eventually, breaking the quiet and alleviating some of the tension that had been gathering. “Seeing you doubled over clutching your head like that, looking like you were in pain but having no immediate way to help.”

Kun sighed. “Someone tried to hack me, rewrite the coding of my cyberbrain. I could _feel_ it happening.”

“I know,” Ten said. “The psymechs scanned you. They found the virus and got rid of it.”

“Then you know you couldn’t help? You know how bad it would’ve been if any of you had tried to hardline connect? That there wasn’t anything you could’ve done?”

Pursed lips and a sigh of acquiescence. “Yeah, I know. We know.”

Kun gave Ten a weak smile. “But?”

Ten looked at him, rubbing tiredly at his eyes, his face. “It was _scary_ , Kun. You were making these choked off gurgles, saying things you wouldn’t have otherwise, you—you sounded like you were dying.”

With more effort than it should’ve taken, Kun reached out with his free hand, humming in appreciation when Ten took it.

“I’m sorry. I never meant to make any of you guys worry that much.”

Ten lifted a corner of his mouth in a half smile. “I know. I don’t think I’m the one that needs to hear that most, though.”

Kun sucked in a slow breath. “He really hasn’t left?”

“Kun,” Ten said around a sad little laugh, reaching forward to flatten out a crease on Kun’s bedding, the green rings Ten had gotten tattooed on his knuckles shifting colors with the movement, “I’ve never seen Johnny that panicked before, that _scared_.” He looked Kun in the eye, gaze weighted with the demand for Kun to listen and understand. “He was the first at your side and he wouldn’t stop shouting for someone to help you, to _save you_. He carried you down to the psymech department so they could stabilize you before bringing you here. Kun, he was _desperate_.”

Hope, Kun thought, was a dangerous, painful thing. It forced Kun to close his eyes and breathe through clenched teeth, so used to stuffing it down that any thought of letting it flourish and take root caused a gut-punch of distress.

“Of course he was worried,” Kun said. “It’s Johnny. He’s good like that.”

A sad, burning truth. Johnny _was_ good like that.

Ten let out a frustrated noise, grabbing onto Kun’s shoulder with a bruising grip, frown toeing the line of an outright glare. 

“Kun, I love you, you’re one of my oldest friends, but you’re _not hearing me right now_. Johnny was beyond worried. He hasn’t left your fucking bedside. _He’s holding on to your fucking hand_.” 

Kun felt his cheeks heat at that, trying to recoil from Ten’s hold and the words being thrown at him, ready to argue and deny.

“No,” Ten gave him a firm shake, staring Kun down, “No retreating. When he’s up, when you’re out of here, at some point—and it better be some point soon—you two need to sit down and talk for once. Because _he doesn’t hate you,_ Kun. Doesn’t even _dislike_ you. In fact,” Ten let out a harsh but quiet laugh, shaking his head as if everything was too ridiculous for him, “I’d say his feelings land _far_ on the other end of the spectrum.” 

Ten let his hold on Kun go, then, just as the sound of multiple voices and excited footsteps neared from outside, likely Mark and Chenle returning with who knows how many members of their team. He leaned back in his chair, eyes fixed on Kun, dark and knowing. “Just thought that was something you should know.”

01101111

Kun was cleared for duty after a scan and a physical check a week later.

He’d spent that week in a limbo of tests and overthinking, his thoughts drifting, unbidden, back to Johnny with a frightening amount of predictability.

Johnny, who’d been in at least once everyday of Kun’s hospital stay, bringing him updates and snacks. Johnny who’d been oddly quiet, circles under his eyes darkening, deepening, watching Kun pour over hardcopies of his test results. Johnny, who tended to Kun with gentle hands, fluffing his pillows, fixing his sheets, hovering near so he’d be able to help if Kun stumbled while they walked.

Johnny, who was leaving Kun concerned and flustered, unsure what to do or how to proceed with the fleeting, maddening touches he was receiving. Touches that burned where they landed, searing through Kun’s clothes with a sort of protective possessiveness that left Kun winded and confused.

“He’s just worried,” Ten said when Kun finally returned with a clear bill of health and freshly set attack barriers and firewalls.

“He looks like a ghost haunting our squad room,” Kun hissed back, watching Johnny stare listlessly at a pile of open files in their joint office space.

“I told you,” Ten sighed, frowning, flicking Kun on the ear and ignoring his pained whine, “Johnny was a wreck when you were hacked. I’ve never seen him look so—so—,” Ten struggled for the right word, “ _distraught_. He was so relieved when they said you’d be okay that he hid in the hallway and _cried_.”

Kun twisted his lips into an expression of discomfort, his stomach roiling with the unease he’d been feeling since Johnny woke up at his bedside and didn’t automatically let go of Kun’s hand.

“Yeah, but…” Kun trailed off with a wince. 

But what? What could he say? How was he supposed to articulate that Johnny’s sudden shift in behavior, in mood, was putting him on edge because it was so much more intimate and vulnerable than he’d been all this time? How was he supposed to say that it made Kun nauseated with nerves to have Johnny staring at him like he was looking _into_ him, past the barriers Kun had been trying so hard to keep in place? How was he supposed to look Ten in the eye and say that, at the root of it all, Johnny was unintentionally scratching at old wounds, old feelings, emotional blood welling up and staining Kun with all the truths he himself didn’t want to face yet?

Truths like the fact that Kun missed him, that he missed Johnny, _his_ Johnny, _so fucking much_. That he was still blisteringly angry when he thought of the past because he was _hurt_ , and that he was only hurt so much—still hurting, chest constantly aching these days—because he loved Johnny more than he ever should’ve.

That Johnny being kind to him was making Kun doubt himself, making him wonder if the Johnny in his head had been twisted into looking like a monster when the real one—the one he’d fought with for years over jurisdiction and cases—was just reflecting back as good as he got. That it was making him worry if he’d let his own bias rule him, leading him to believe rumors about Johnny stepping in on Kun’s cases on purpose in order to take credit, when that was something he would have never believed Johnny capable of before he left. Before Kun decided he hated him.

That maybe Kun had been the antagonist in this all, even if he’d felt justified in the vitriol he’d spat over the years. 

How was Kun supposed to confess to any of that without Ten looking at him like he was an idiot? Like he was in the wrong. Like he was making things harder for himself when they were never that easy to begin with. 

“I told you to talk to him,” Ten said, lowering his voice so only Kun would hear. “To clear things up. Have you?”

Kun sighed, peeking over at Johnny again, nails digging into his palms when he caught Johnny already staring back. Kun wrenched his gaze away, breathing coming in shorter bursts, his heart beating uncomfortably fast.

“You know the answer to that.”

Ten hummed. “You’re only gonna be able to run from things so much longer before one of you breaks. Please don’t let yourself break, Kun.”

“I’ll try,” Kun managed, trying for a smile that likely came off more as a grimace. He cleared his throat, forcing the tension in his shoulders to loosen and fall to his back through willpower alone, and tugged a more passable ‘can do’ expression onto his face. “So, tell me about the attempted hack, I saw the test results so I know the type of virus but do you have any leads on how it was planted? Did the psymechs have any theories?”

Ten gave him a withering look of disapproval for the blatant and rickety attempt at switching topics, but let him get away with it, slouching back in his chair with a put-upon sigh.

“The psymechs didn’t come up with much, but they did figure out where the intrusion occurred,” Ten said, idly rolling his chair back and forth. “It was from a hardline connection, either you connecting to someone’s ports, or someone connecting to yours.”

Kun chewed on the inside of his cheek, processing that information, going down a quick mental list of the people he’d linked up with recently and finding that it was very short, if not nonexistent. The most recent being Wang Xinyu, the thought of which sent a small shiver down Kun’s spine.

He’d had his suspicions. That’s why he and Renjun had been going back that day they found the former detective dead. But...

“I’ve linked up to access our own video evidence archives,” Kun said slowly, “and for memory shares with a witness and one of the past detectives, Wang Xinyu, but nothing else beyond that.”

“Mm, yeah, I was afraid you’d say that. You see, Yangyang and Jaemin put together a theory, about when that first virus was imbedded.” Ten leaned back in his chair, at risk of tipping over entirely, and shouted: “Yangyang, Jaemin, come over here!”

There was a clatter from one of the desks, Yangyang startling up from where he’d been dozing, pinwheeling backwards and falling to the floor with a dull thud and a loud groan. Jaemin, who’d been flicking between a set of holo-screens, jumped in his seat, turning wide eyes on Ten before casting a quick, pitying look at where Yangyang was crawling back up.

They both came over, clearly wary, looking just as exhausted as the rest of the team—button-ups traded for clean shirts and soft long sleeves, both appropriately wrinkled for the time of night, and hair sticking out at odd angles from intermittent cat-naps.

“What’s up?” Jaemin asked at the same time that Yangyang whined out a childish, very age- _in_ appropriate “ _Why?_ ”

“Tell Kun where you think he got hacked.”

“Oh,” both men turned to Kun, gazes sharper—Yangyang’s lips pursed in concern and Jaemin’s brows drawn down. 

“Well,” Yangyang started, “It’s just a hypothesis really, but the last time you reported connecting with someone through a wire was after talking with Wang Xinyu that second time, before he was killed.”

Kun breathed in slow. _And there it was_.

“You told us after that he’d been acting weird at the time,” Jaemin picked up, sharing a look with Yangyang, “Calmer but more physically twitchy, right?”

“Right,” Kun said, gears in his head turning, taking their train of thought and rolling with it. “You think that was the breach.” Not a question, because it made sense, Kun should’ve seen it himself, earlier. “You think Wang Xinyu had been unknowingly corrupted with a Trojan Horse.”

“We think Mr. Wang, and Donghyuck, and Renjun were right,” Yangyang said. “We think the Dressmaker is inhabiting different bodies, and that who you met that second time wasn’t actually Wang Xinyu, but someone else entirely.”

The hair’s on Kun’s neck stood on end. “Then, when I was hacked, it wasn’t just an infiltration or a memory rewrite…”

Jaemin winced. “We think the Dressmaker was trying to rewrite _all_ your data, delete you, your ghost. We think he was trying to do a full take over.”

“He just didn’t account for the level of cyber security bureau agents are equipped with,” Ten finished.

Kun nodded, clasping his hands together in front of him, pressing his knuckles to his mouth. “I really did almost die, then.”

He looked up at Ten, then at Jaemin and Yangyang, all of them with matching expressions of worry.

Kun licked his lips, the full enormity of what this discovery about the Dressmaker meant landing with a crash on his already weighted shoulders.

“And we have a problem.”

01110101

The revelation that not only was Wang Xinyu likely murdered by the Dressmaker for posing a threat in some way, but that he’d also been overwritten by the serial killer to be used as a puppet, didn’t go over well.

It was worrisome enough that the Dressmaker had inserted himself into the investigation by taking over people close to it—a staggering number of them, too, if they assumed that anyone reported as behaving oddly was one of the Dressmaker’s bodies now. It was significantly worse that he’d almost killed Kun.

At least, that’s how Johnny seemed to take it.

Kun had thought the other man was acting like a hovering mother hen before, but now, he rarely let Kun go anywhere alone.

“You’re a target,” Johnny reasoned out, when Kun asked him point blank one day, nerves grating from not having any alone time. “The Dressmaker’s been in your head, there’s plenty of reason to believe you’re at risk, Kun. And, it’s not like you’re gonna let us put a protective detail on you, so,” Johnny had shrugged, offering Kun a disastrous half pout that would’ve incited insulted rage before but only made Kun feel flustered and attacked now, “this is the next best thing.”

But it was too much. Kun felt suffocated and confused.

Even when it was another member of the team doing the babysitting, Kun still felt his skin crawling with the restriction of being _protected_.

It was ridiculous. He was a trained professional, and what had happened could’ve happened to any of them. Just because _he’d_ been the unlucky one to stumble into the Dressmaker’s direct path didn’t mean they needed to stick to him like glue.

And then another girl went missing, while three of the names on their “suspected of being Dressmaker proxies” list turned up burnt out and dead, and the level of unwanted protection being showered on Kun skyrocketed.

Kun chafed at it, so much of his upset coming from the fact that he _just couldn’t tell_ what part of Johnny’s fussing was professional duty, and what part...wasn’t.

A voice that sounded an awful lot like Ten’s whispered through his head, saying: _“You never talked to him. You’d know what he meant by all this if you’d just talked to him.”_

Kun was a coward in this, though. He always had been, as much as he hated to admit it, when it came to Johnny.

He’d been too scared to properly talk when they were cadets. He’d been too scared to reach out when Johnny had left. He’d been too scared _and_ hurt to talk when Johnny had come back. And, then, when they were paired together, he’d been far too angry to even think about broaching the testy subject of their shared history.

Kun felt himself fraying, though. Coming awfully close to caving to the questions building up—questions whose weight he was drowning under.

Especially when Johnny insisted on driving Kun home.

Somehow, laughably, out of everything Johnny had done so far since Kun woke up in the hospital with his hand being warmed in a gentle hold, _this_ was the straw that broke the camel’s back. _This_ —being brought home late into the night, an odd tension humming pleasantly between them—was the act of intimacy that drove Kun over the edge.

“Enough,” he blurted out as Johnny walked into Kun’s apartment before him to do a sweep, “This is just— _enough!_ ”

Johnny, who’d been coming back towards the apartment’s entryway, holstering his gun with an absently spoken, _“Clear”,_ froze in place like a giant deer in headlights.

“You’re going to wake your neighbors shouting like that.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Kun hissed.

He stormed in, yanking the door shut behind him even though he was just about to toss Johnny out.

“You’re fucking insufferable, you know that?” Kun demanded, feeling his chest clog at the sudden realization that Johnny _was in his home_. Under less than pleasant circumstances, sure, but he was here, standing under the soft glow of his apartment lights looking a bit like a kicked puppy with his brows furrowed in confusion. “I told you back at the bureau that this was unnecessary and you just—” Kun made a gurgling noise of frustration, yanking his shoes off with more force than necessary, “ _don’t listen_. _Ever_.”

“I listen,” Johnny said smartly. “And I’ve explained to you why this is necessary. _You_ just don’t listen. At least, not when I’m the one talking.”

Kun spun on him, glaring, irritated, wanting nothing more than to be alone to wallow in his own thoughts and feelings while he decompressed. Not whatever _this_ was turning out to be.

“I—what does that mean?”

Johnny’s eyes widened a fraction before he deflated with a sigh. “Nothing. Sorry. Nothing. I’m just,” he waved a hand in the air, looking away from Kun—eyes skimming over Kun’s living room, the small dining space, the kitchenette, with a melancholy smile, “Just a little tired.”

Kun blinked, thrown by the way Johnny was curling in on himself, hunching his shoulders and ducking his head so his fringe was falling in his face. So Kun couldn’t see his eyes.

An old, ugly anger flared. One that had been tamped down and muddled this whole time; while they were playing nice, and Johnny was being disarmingly kind.

He caught Johnny’s arm just before he could walk out, belatedly realizing Johnny had been stomping around with his shoes still on.

“What was that supposed to mean, John?”

Johnny could have broken out of Kun’s hold. He had strength on Kun—who only had plating enhancements on his bones to Johnny’s full on prosthetics. Johnny let Kun keep him in place, though, towering over him, jaw clenching while he stared ahead at the door.

“What was that supposed to me—”

Johnny moved quick, spinning on his heel to face Kun, to stare him down and break free from his hold. His breathing was coming heavy, even if it was controlled, his button-up straining on every inhale.

“What do you think it meant, Kun?”

Kun blinked rapidly, taking an unsteady step back when Johnny pushed forward. He found himself caught between holding his ground and letting Johnny corner him, the feeling so reminiscent of their past together it made his bones ache.

He also felt insulted at the implications of Johnny’s statement, though.

“I listen better than you ever have,” Kun snapped, voice low and sharp, “So, I really don’t get how _you_ could _ever_ say that _I_ don’t fucking listen.”

Johnny laughed, mirthless and dark, hurt. Oh, that was _hurt_. “That’s bullshit and you know it, Kun. When it comes to me it’s just,” he raked a harsh hand through his hair, the strands falling handsomely back into place because of course they would, “white noise. No matter what I do, it just washes over you like nothing.” 

He shook his head, looking anywhere but at Kun, eyeing the door before redirecting his gaze to an old stain on Kun’s wall. 

“You know, I thought that this case could actually be a chance to finally hash things out, find out why the fuck you were treating me like dirt under your shoe, but I see that not even a near death experience will change things and _fuck_ , fuck, this is really not the fucking time for all of this.”

Johnny took a step back, rubbing his hands over his face, his whole body sagging as the tension that had been building up in his shoulders faded all at once.

“This isn’t the time, and you’re right, I’ve overstepped my bounds. I should go. I’m sorry. Forget—” Johnny sucked in a sharp breath, letting it out on a stuttery exhale, “Forget everything I said just now. When we’re done with this case you won’t have to see me anymore so, problem solved.”

Kun felt his heart jump, his mind spinning, trying to absorb and understand everything Johnny had just said, everything he’d just thrown at him.

“Wait,” Kun half-shouted, lunging for Johnny’s wrist again, fingers digging in, knowing that his grip wouldn’t hurt Johnny’s prosthetic left. “What do you—I never—you’re the one who started it, though!”

Johnny raised a judging brow and Kun wanted to shrink away, feeling his cheeks burn but unwilling to let go. The way Johnny was talking made it seem like Kun had started the animosity between them. He sounded like he’d done nothing wrong.

“ _You_ poked your nose in our cases—”

“I never did anything out of my jurisdictional bounds,” Johnny scoffed. “I never took a case that wasn’t ours in the first place.”

“ _You_ took International Crimes when you fucking _knew_ that I’d been hoping to—”

“That wasn’t something I could control!”

“You left!”

Kun’s chest was heaving. Johnny frowned down at him, not seeming to understand.

“I came back.”

“ _But you fucking left_.” Kun’s throat burned, a constricting tightness that he could feel creeping up and settling in behind his eyes. “You _left_. And then, when you came back, you didn’t fucking say _anything_.”

“Kun, you—” Johnny was turning to him again, more wary this time instead of angry. His tone softer, more confused. “I came back and _you wouldn’t even look me in the eye,_ ” he said, breath coming out in a scoff, “What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to say?”

Kun’s grip on Johnny’s wrist tightened. He wondered if it would bruise. Hoped, in a dark corner of his wounded heart, that it would.

“You left,” Kun said, letting out a watery hiccup of a laugh, sounding like a sad, broken record that was scratched up and worn down, “breaking my heart in the process. And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, you came back and took my fucking dream too.”

Johnny recoiled at that, looking startled and wounded. “Kun, I—I didn’t— _you_ never reached out—”

“Of course I didn’t!” Kun hissed, taking a firm step forward. “You made it pretty fucking clear where I stood with you when you made sure everyone knew we were _‘just friends’,_ rightbefore leaving without a _fucking word_. Why the fuck would I have embarrassed myself more by acting like the lovesick idiot who couldn’t get the hints?”

“I—Kun, I hadn’t been ready, then, you had to have realized that,” Johnny said, clearly flustered in the way his eyes were rapidly searching over Kun’s face, voice raising in defense, “I didn’t even know how I felt until left, I didn't know I l—”

He stopped, cutting himself off with his free hand clapped over his mouth.

Kun stared up at him, eyes wild, heart racing. “Finish that.”

Johnny shook his head. Then, weakly: “Now’s really not the time for this, Kun.”

“Fuck you,” Kun breathed, hardly any bite behind it, adrenaline coursing through his veins because he could admit it to himself now; he was still in love with Johnny, even after everything that’d happened. That was a truth that probably wouldn’t ever change if it hadn’t by now. “Finish what you were saying.”

“Why does it matter?” Johnny sighed, looking at Kun with tired eyes. “It won’t change anything. You’ve made that clear enough. I really should just go home now before we make this worse.”

“Johnny.” Kun stepped close enough that he could smell Johnny’s cologne, sharp pine; crisp and welcoming. _Love_ , to Kun’s hopeful, freshly vulnerable heart. “Please. Finish what you were saying.”

Johnny eyed him, so clearly weighing the pros and cons of just leaving that Kun found him taking an unconscious step even closer. He could feel Johnny’s body heat, now. Johnny’s gaze was liquid heat where it landed, scrutinizing, trying to figure out what Kun was playing at.

“Why are you so worried about me, Johnny? Why have you been hovering? Why was it so hard to just talk to me when I’ve seen you flat out approach everyone else whenever you want to clear the air? What,” Kun took a breath, hoping he wasn’t red in the face, knowing that he probably was, “What were you about to say?”

Johnny looked small in that moment, eyes wide, expression open, and...hope? Was that hope in his eyes? God, Kun hoped it was.

Johnny took a breath, an airy thing that must’ve been completely insubstantial for its purpose. “I didn’t—it took me leaving to realize how I felt about you. To,” he swallowed, licked his lips, let his eyes fall down to Kun’s for the briefest of moments with the most forlorn look in his eyes before darting back up, “To realize that I love you.”

Kun’s heart pinched all at once and then expanded, heat diffusing through him, leaving him feeling light on his feet. “Love. Not loved.”

Johnny took another breath, gaining strength from whatever expression was painted across Kun’s face, squaring his shoulders. “Love.”

“Fuck,” Kun said, voice cracking.

“I know it’s not the best for me to say that now,” Johnny said, wincing, looking away as the words tumbled out of his mouth, “I know after all this time, after—after how I was about us back then, it’s not really good form, but I—”

Kun, in a display of blind recklessness, doesn’t actually let Johnny finish what he was saying, dragging him down by his wrist and hauling him close with a fresh grip on his shirt collar, slotting their mouths together in a hard kiss.

It wasn’t the best, but that was fine, because it wasn’t their first.

What it _was_ , was everything Kun needed, _wanted_ , in that moment. It was relief, a sense of _finally_. Happiness in the press of lips, nip of teeth, slide of tongues.

“Kun?” Johnny croaked when they parted, eyes the size of moons, willingly hunched over in Kun’s hold still.

“Ten was right,” Kun breathed, licking his lips and relishing in the sting he felt when he passed over a spot where Johnny’s teeth had broken skin. “We should’ve talked earlier.”

“Ten?” Johnny asked, holding himself perfectly still even though Kun could feel the eager energy rolling off him in waves.

Kun smiled. Johnny was waiting for Kun to take the next step, to lead.

“He gave some good advice that I should’ve listened to,” Kun breathed, pressing a kiss to the naturally upturned corner of Johnny’s lips. Johnny stuttered out a sigh. “I’ll explain later.”

“Sure you shouldn’t explain now?” Johnny asked, eyes heavy lidded and trained solidly on Kun’s mouth. “Seems like not talking has been a core problem for us this whole time.”

“Later,” Kun promised. He took a step back, pulling Johnny along with him. “After. _Properly_. But right now,” he kissed Johnny again, sliding his tongue into Johnny’s mouth the way he remembered Johnny liked, tasting an odd but not entirely unpleasant blend of coffee, tobacco, and spearmint lingering along his teeth and tongue, “can we just…?”

“If that’s what you want,” Johnny breathed, bringing tentative hands up to rest at Kun’s hips.

“Yeah.” Kun dug his nails into the skin of Johnny’s wrist and tightened his hold on his shirt. A stark contrast to the gentle way he brushed their noses together. “That’s what I want.”

Arguably, this—stumbling blindly back towards Kun’s bedroom, almost going tumbling to the floor when Johnny hastily kicked off his shoes and socks, Kun’s own socks and belt quickly following—was a terrible idea.

But so was kissing him in the first place, and Kun had already done that with a degree of hunger he hadn’t expected.

Kun could acknowledge he’d been wrong about quite a few things, namely Johnny’s feelings towards him. In every way, shape and form, letting someone shove their tongue down your throat and manhandle you out of your clothes and into bed would be considered above and beyond if you were just trying to keep things “cordial” at work.

He could also admit he’d read Johnny’s intentions wrong, especially if Johnny seemed willing to admit he hadn’t handled things well either.

So, it made this bad idea marginally better, and, in Kun’s opinion, a step in the right direction for _them_. Things had never been conventional for them anyway, there was no harm in doing things at their own pace.

“You’re thinking too much,” Johnny panted, splayed out on Kun’s too small queen-sized bed.

His shirt had already been unbuttoned by Kun’s deft fingers and tossed somewhere on Kun’s bedroom floor to be found later, his pants quick to follow, leaving him in only a tight pair of dark boxer-briefs that did nothing to hide the impressive bulge stretching out the elastic material. There were spots of pink high on his cheeks, his hands curling in Kun’s comforter as he watched Kun quickly strip out of his own clothes, licking his lips when Kun shucked off his underwear, too, leaving himself completely bare for Johnny to see.

“Sorry,” Kun said. “Can’t help it.”

He crawled onto the bed, settling himself between Johnny’s spread legs with purpose. Johnny pushed himself up on an arm—muscles flexing and bulging across his abdomen, biceps standing out beautifully—reaching out for Kun with the other.

“S’okay,” he said against Kun’s lips, licking into his mouth with a sigh, moaning when Kun dragged his blunt nails over the planes of his abdomen, catching on the ridges of muscle until reaching the waistband of his underwear. “It’s okay to stop thinking for a little.”

Kun laughed, palming at Johnny’s cock through the thin material of his briefs, savoring in the full-body shiver and high whine that earned him. “Isn’t that what we’re doing here already?”

Johnny looked up at him from where he’d let his head drop, watching Kun slowly work him over, abs tightening in time with his cock jumping against Kun’s hand. “Yeah,” he leaned forward, searching for another kiss, “It is. Let go, Kun.”

Letting go, in this, came blissfully easy.

Kun helped Johnny shimmy out of his boxer-briefs, the material already wet across the front from Johnny’s cock dribbling up precum, draping himself over the taller man once the last clothing barrier was gone.

He let his hands wander, stroking up Johnny’s sides, tracing over all the well-maintained muscle Johnny had managed to keep over the years, palming over the meat of his pecs and dancing his fingers along the thin black lines Johnny had gotten tattooed over where Kun imagined his prosthetics started and his original body ended. He dipped down to tongue at one of Johnny’s nipples; sucking and nipping and licking until it was pert and Johnny was a softly moaning mess.

Before Kun moved over to lavish Johnny’s other side with equal attention, he leaned up, dragging their cocks together in the process, to tell him: “You can touch me too, you know.”

Johnny made a broken noise somewhere in the back of his throat, his hands—which had been twisting politely in the bedding—immediately coming up to grope at Kun’s ass, grabbing a cheek in each and squeezing.

Kun moaned, hips pressing down in a slow grind that had fire licking down his spine.

Johnny laughed, his breath coming out as a soft _ah_ from Kun sucking wet over his nipple. “Good?”

Kun huffed, sinking his teeth into the flesh of Johnny’s pec, hard enough to have Johnny flinching up with a low groan, but not enough to _hurt_ hurt. 

“Fuck, _Kun_.”

Johnny brought a leg up to wrap around one of Kun’s own, using that as leverage to slowly fuck up against Kun’s pelvis, grinding hard against Kun’s body while Kun left an open-mouthed trail of kisses up to the hollow of Johnny’s throat.

He bit down at the skin he could get between his teeth, there, sucking a dark bruise into the base of Johnny’s throat before inching up, higher and higher, until eventually he had to reach up and tangle a hand in the long, sleek strands of Johnny’s hair, tugging him closer.

Johnny grunted at the odd angle but didn’t complain, moaning quietly by Kun’s ear at the firm hold Kun had on him, his own hands traveling up and down the expanse of Kun’s back, nails digging into muscle and scratching as he went. 

Arousal, molten in Kun’s veins, flared at the harsh touch before settling low in his gut. It had his cock jumping between them, precum oozing out and painting a sticky trail across Johnny’s abs.

Johnny, whose head was being held at an awkward angle while Kun took his time mauling his throat and licking over the shell of his ear, moaned loudly at the sight.

“Kun, please, I, can we— _ah!_ ” 

“Hmm?” Kun hummed, letting Johnny go and pushing himself up to admire his work; Johnny now covered in marks that wouldn’t fade for days from chest to neck. “What would you like?”

Johnny huffed out a noise of disbelief, flopping back onto the bed and bringing an arm up to cover his eyes. His cheeks were flushed the loveliest of pinks, the soft color slowly crawling up to his ears and down to his neck in splotches that Kun had the intense urge to kiss.

“Fuck, hah, I don’t remember you being this much in bed.”

Kun raised an eyebrow, sitting back on his heels to to survey Johnny’s whole body properly, taking in the scars from old injuries on his torso—both job related and not—and the crisp, black, band-like lines divvying up skin from synthetic. He reached down to curl a hand, dry and calloused, around Johnny’s cock—the weight of which had flopped back onto Johnny’s belly to lazily drool precum, forming a sticky puddle.

“You wouldn’t,” Kun said simply, watching Johnny’s whole body twitch and shiver as he dragged his hand up Johnny’s shaft to circle his head and thumb at his slit, collecting precum before sliding back down, continuing the cycle at a quickening pace. “You used to fuck me, dirty and quick. You wouldn’t really know how I do things in bed.”

Johnny gasped out a breath as Kun’s pace had his cock pulsing, an angry red now and so hard it looked like it hurt. “Right,” he managed.

A small smile twitched at Kun’s lips, fond from the genuine apology Kun could glean off of the way Johnny bit his lip and slanted his eyebrows upward in thought.

“It’s fine,” Kun said, stroking a hand over Johnny’s hip, gripping tight and wondering if there’d be fingerprints there tomorrow for him to see. “Us then isn’t us now. You wouldn’t have liked this, then.” Kun let go of Johnny’s cock to a desperate whine, Johnny breathing hard and heavy through his nose as he came down from the peak he’d been climbing to. Kun crawled over him for a second, rustling around under his bed for the lube and condoms he kept under there, coming back with a half used bottle and a foil wrapper. “Now, well, you’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

Johnny squeezed his eyes shut on a deep, shuddering breath in. When he opened them again to meet Kun’s gaze, his eyes were dark pools, reflecting the low lighting of the hallway from Kun’s left-open bedroom door.

“I feel like you’re trying to kill me, but yeah,” he brought a hand down to fist his own cock, squeezing tight and keening at the pleasure it gave him, eyes never leaving Kun’s, “Yeah, I’m enjoying this.”

Kun grinned, a hungry beast that’d been slumbering for nearly a decade waking up at the feast laid out before it.

“Good.”

Kun resettled himself between Johnny’s legs and uncapped the bottle. He squirted out some lube into his hand, warming it for a beat before bringing his now slick fingers down to circle the pucker of Johnny’s entrance.

Johnny’s body went tense for a moment, muscles standing out in high relief. He relaxed as Kun circled the tight ring of muscle, stroking Johnny’s cock with his free hand to help him loosen up. And then, when Johnny was making low noises of appreciation again, muttering how good Kun was with his hands, Kun pushed the first finger in.

Johnny moaned at the intrusion, Kun drinking in the sight of him squirming under his hands, blood rushing in his ears knowing that soon, it’d be his cock pushing in, filling Johnny up and fucking him senseless—like he’d dreamed of in his darkest hours from day one of being put together on this case.

That thought, that _image_ , in mind Kun worked at opening Johnny up.

He worked his finger in, curling and searching for the little bundle of nerves that would make Johnny go taut—only ever having the chance to finger Johnny open and watch him unravel once while they were something between friends and more back in the academy. When he found Johnny’s prostate, he had the infinite pleasure of watching Johnny’s back arch, a loud gasp escaping his chest.

“There?” Kun asked, as if Johnny’s reaction wasn’t enough.

“ _Yes_ ,” Johnny hissed, mouth falling open on a stream of low, panting breaths.

Kun worked one finger in until the slide was easy, Johnny’s body accepting, adding more lube to the already slick mess he was making before moving up to two and repeating the process over again. He worked his way up to three fingers, curling and prodding at Johnny’s walls, feeling Johnny clench around him, his body desperately trying to keep Kun’s fingers in on every out-stroke. Johnny kept remarkably still through all of it, heels shifting on the sheets for purchase and hips bucking down for more, but he didn’t throw around any of the strength he could. Any of the strength he _used to_. And that—that, made Kun feel powerful, cock jumping and aching to be touched, to sink into Johnny’s heat.

Kun pulled out his fingers, ducking down to press a soothing kiss to Johnny’s hip when he moaned out Kun’s name in complaint, his hole clenching around air.

“Open this?” Kun asked, offering up the condom wrapper, smiling when Johnny scrambled to sit up and take it, tearing it open with lust-driven efficiency.

Without being asked, Johnny took the liberty of rolling the condom on over Kun’s dick, head bent close to Kun’s with how he was leaning forward in concentration, fringe brushing against Kun’s forehead from proximity.

Kun shivered at the contact, eyes fluttering closed briefly at the wave of pleasure that rolled through him, his dick having gone untouched for the duration of Johnny’s prepping.

“Thanks,” he breathed, pecking Johnny on the cheek, then slotting their mouths together in a sloppy kiss while Kun lined himself up. “Good?” he asked when they separated, both panting into the sparse space between them.

Johnny nodded, eyes blown and hazy. “Yeah, good.”

It was a bit of a trick in this position—Johnny not laying back enough to give Kun a good angle to slide in—but they made it work. Johnny wanted to be close, and Kun, who’d missed Johnny more than he could ever properly put into words, wasn’t about to push him away—even if he did shove his hips forward, thrust a touch desperate, a bit rough, pushing into Johnny with a grunt.

Johnny took it well, though. His muscles tensed in obvious strain, but the tension bled out quickly when Kun picked up pumping his cock again with his still lube slick hand, focusing on tracing the prominent veins and rubbing under the head, moving his hand down to fondle his balls as an added touch.

Johnny’s breathing picked up from short, sharp bursts of discomfort to deeper heaves of pleasure the longer Kun continued his ministrations, sighing when Kun fully bottomed out, hips pressed to ass.

Kun held still for a moment, marveling at the feel of Johnny hot and tight around him, before he was inching back out and slamming back in.

Johnny choked out a startled hiccup, cock dribbling a generous amount of precum as Kun picked up the length and depth of his strokes.

It didn’t take long before Johnny was falling back onto the bed, abs tensing, his ass shifted up onto Kun’s lap and his legs splayed out on either side of Kun’s hips. He was writhing, fisting the sheets as the most amazing sounds slipped past his lips.

High keens and loud, unabashed moans bounced off the walls of Kun’s bedroom, Johnny’s jaw slack as he let every noise of pleasure slip out along with each breath, his eyes thin slits as he watched Kun fuck into him hard and smooth.

It was a heady feeling, having Johnny like this, and probably nothing symbolized the fresh start they seemed to be making than this, than Kun fucking Johnny hard enough that the slap of their skin was sharp in the air, punctuation for each thrust in—as if Johnny’s moans weren’t enough.

Kun wondered what Johnny saw, watching Kun as steadily as he was. Wondered if he found it as pleasing as what Kun got to see: Johnny, all long, strong, muscled limbs, writhing on his cock, sweat-damp chest heaving on each hiccuped breath.

He hoped Johnny liked what he saw. Hoped he liked the way Kun had kept trim, even if his muscles were a bit softer. He hoped he liked how Kun looked, his own mouth open on each panted breath, sweat dripping down his neck, his back, his chest. 

Kun shifted angles, rearranged Johnny’s position so one long leg was draped over Kun’s shoulder in a stretch that would probably sting tomorrow, leaning forward so that Kun could mouth at Johnny’s neck again, their chests occasionally brushing and sending sparks dancing along Kun’s skin.

Like this, he hit deeper, and on the next thrust in, Johnny cried out, a strangled sound that was part-moan part-exclamation.

“ _There_ ,” Johnny begged, eyes tearing up. He tangled a hand in Kun’s hair, the other coming around to dig into the meat of Kun’s shoulder. “Please, Kun, there, _please_.”

Kun fucked into him hard and fast, making Johnny cry out with pleasure, absorbing the steady litany of desperate sweet nothings falling from Johnny’s lips like a flower soaking up the sun.

He kept up a bruising pace that would leave his own body tired in the morning, chasing his own release as much as Johnny’s, feeling it lurking just on the edge of his perception, building rapidly with each fuck in.

Any other time Kun would feel embarrassed over how quickly he was tumbling towards completion, but not now. Not when Johnny was being so _sweet_ for him, so hot and wet and _tight_ around his cock; until the only thing on Kun’s mind was Johnny, Johnny, _Johnny_. 

As if it hadn’t always been that way anyway.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Kun grunted, working a hand between them, fisting Johnny’s cock and working it fast and dirty, just barely in-time with his thrusts.

Johnny made a choked-off whine, nails digging into Kun’s shoulder, bright pinpricks of pain that only had the coil in Kun’s gut tightening.

Kun huffed out a breath, spit into his hand to slick the way as he stroked Johnny off, hips stuttering and thrusts turning erratic. 

Johnny let out a startled, garbled noise, gasping out a rushed, “Fuck, Kun I’m—” before he was coming, shooting over Kun’s fist and up onto his own chest in thick white spurts. He moaned, the sound rumbling out of his chest as Kun fucked him through his orgasm, shoving forward into the clench of Johnny’s body while it tightened around him, sucking him in until it was too much and Kun was seeing stars, gasping out a breath he didn’t even realize he’d been holding.

Kun spilled into the condom, wishing that this wasn’t their first time together after years of misunderstood and misplaced anger, so that he could be coming warm into Johnny’s body instead.

His hips twitched on the come down, the sounds of Johnny and Kun trying to catch their breaths loud in the sudden silence of the room.

There was a moment where Johnny raked his fingers through Kun’s hair, forcing Kun—eyes a bit wild from the force of his orgasm and mouth still open on every breath—to look at him. Johnny’s eyes seemed to search his face, his mouth eventually curling into an easy smile that had Kun’s heart skipping in his chest.

“That was good.”

Kun huffed out a laugh, helping Johnny lower his leg back down off Kun’s shoulder and sliding his softening cock out of Johnny’s hole.

“It was.”

Johnny watched him take off the condom and tie it off, tossing it with a lucky throw into the waste bin situated by his bedside shelf. 

“The best I’ve had in years.”

Kun looked over at him, eyebrow raised in amusement. “Me too.”

Johnny’s easy smile widened. “Good.”

Kun’s chest filled with a gentle warmth, patting Johnny’s knee while he climbed off the bed, going to get a damp towel to clean Johnny up with.

He wiped himself off quickly in the bathroom, more perfunctory than anything, too tired to do more now that the excitement of the evening—of the day, really—was ebbing away. Walking back, he made sure to grab an extra comforter along the way, dropping it at the foot of the bed temporarily so that he could clean Johnny first.

Johnny practically purred at Kun’s gentle touches, brushing his fingertips over every bit of skin he could reach, “Because I can, now.”

Kun couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up from it, shooing Johnny away long enough to wrangle the soiled sheet out from under him, encouraging him to lie on the old comforter instead before draping the new one across.

When Kun crawled into bed next to him, it was to find Johnny on his side, already staring at him in the intense way he always seemed to.

“We still need to properly talk,” he said, voice low and gentle. “You know that, right?”

“Mm,” Kun hummed, curling closer to the warmth Johnny constantly threw off, happy to be able to do this now. “I know. Over breakfast?”

Johnny smiled, reaching out to pull Kun closer by the waist, tucking him under his chin so that he could nuzzle his nose against the crown of Kun’s head. “Sure. And probably over lunch too.”

Kun nodded, a short movement, tracing his fingers over a scare he wasn’t familiar with but soon would be.

He started to drift like that, dozing off in Johnny’s arms, mind still having a hard time understanding all the turns his night had ended up taking, the future looking different than it had just that morning.

“Kun,” Johnny started softly, voice a soothing rumble.

“Mm.”

“Did you really think I’d ruin your chances at work on purpose?”

Kun frowned, not expecting a question like that before sleep, right after they’d fucked. That was a question for the morning, when they could sit down like the proper adults they pretended to be and finally _talk_.

“I did,” Kun sighed. “I was angry, Johnny.”

“That—at least that you know I would never do, right?”

Kun wrapped his arms securely around Johnny’s waist, even if the one under the other man would fall asleep at some point in the night and wake Kun, up numb to all sensation.

“Yeah. I do.”

Johnny sighed, slotting a leg between Kun’s, his impressive thigh fitting comfortably there.

“Good.”

Kun ran his fingers up Johnny’s back. “Goodnight, Johnny.”

A smile, pressed into the top of Kun’s head. “Goodnight, Kun.”

00100000

To say that things shifted monumentally after they fucked would be both true and false.

They ate breakfast together early the next morning at Kun’s tiny excuse for a dining table, knees bumping comfortably as they shared a plate of tomato and egg stir fry, picking at a smattering of pickled side dishes.

They talked in low tones, voices still thick with sleep, the two of them only bothering to throw on their boxers.

It was nice, and calm, and everything that should’ve happened over ten years ago; back when Kun first started feeling something more for Johnny.

They came up with some initial guidelines for this fragile new start, Johnny tangling their legs together while he sipped at his coffee. Things like if they’d tell anyone of this recent change, and if they did, then who.

“Ten will probably murder me if I don’t tell him we slept together,” Kun sighed, curling his hands around his own coffee mug, enjoying the heat seeping into his skin while admiring how handsome Johnny looked sitting shirtless in Kun’s home.

Johnny chuckled, hiding his smile behind his mug. “Sounds about right. A tiny terror that one is.”

Kun snorted, rubbing the side of his foot absently over Johnny’s ankle. They’d _have_ to tell some people, honestly, because Kun was having a hard time keeping his hands to himself right now, still in awe that _this_ is how things had turned out. 

“He is,” Kun agreed, “But he’s my best friend and has been highly invested in how this would play out from the start. So, I’d like to tell him.”

Johnny nodded, taking another sip of coffee. 

“I’d like to tell Mark,” he said. “He came over with me after my stint in the U.S. He’s...heard a lot about you. So, yeah, if you don’t mind, I’d like to tell him.”

Kun smiled, scrubbing a hand through his hair and stretching his arms up, sighing in satisfaction when his back gave off a series of realigning pops. Sleeping curled up with Johnny was a balm on his heart, but hard on his back.

His bed was too small for one full-grown man and a giant, after all, and his body didn’t put up with sleeping in stiff positions the way it used to.

“Go ahead,” Kun told him, getting up to start clearing the plates, the clock blinking on the environment control panel for the apartment’s temperature and base lighting systems reminding him that they needed to be leaving soon. “I don’t mind.” 

He put the dishes to soak in the sink, promising himself to come back tonight and clean them while quickly wiping down the counter so there wasn’t as much of a mess to tackle later. The soft _scrnch_ of chair legs moving over flooring and bare feet padding across the kitchenette’s tile alerted Kun to Johnny coming up behind him before the taller man was wrapping strong arms around his waist, tucking his nose into the crook of Kun’s neck.

“Since I won’t get to do this at work,” Johnny mumbled, lips brushing Kun’s skin in a featherlight caress. “Can we talk some more over lunch today?”

Kun leaned back into the sturdy, warm wall of Johnny’s chest, shivering faintly at the soft press of skin-on-skin. “Of course. What’re you doing about a change of clothes?”

Johnny sighed, his breath fanning hot over Kun’s neck and down towards Kun’s clavicles. “I have an extra pair at work. I’ll shower and change there. Need a ride?”

Kun shook his head, turning in Johnny’s arms to press a kiss against the sharp line of Johnny’s jaw. “Ten insisted on ferrying me around yesterday so my car’s here.”

“Do you hate it that much?” Johnny asked, eyes searching Kun’s for a moment before his bottom lip was pushing out in a devastating pout. A pout that was far more effective than it should have been on a thirty-six year old man.

“Hate what?” Kun asked, sliding free from Johnny’s hold, trailing his fingers down Johnny’s arm as he went.

Johnny followed him back to the bedroom, picking up the discarded pieces of his clothes. “Others looking out for you, being worried about you.”

Kun snorted, grabbing his towel and heading for the bathroom. “Only when it interferes with work.”

“Uh-huh,” Kun could _hear_ the smile in Johnny’s voice without even having to look, “Sure.” Heavy, rapid steps followed and Johnny was behind him again, placing a quick kiss on the crown of Kun’s head. “See you at work, drive safe.”

And then he was darting off like a child, smiling bright, still trying to fasten up all the buttons on his shirt.

Kun’s heart jumped. God, he was fucked. Absolutely ruined for anyone else from day one. But, now, that didn’t seem like it had to scare him as much as it used to.

01110011

Kun had to tackle Ten before he could shout a loud and obvious, “I told you so!” for everyone in the fucking bureau building to hear.

It was hands down one of the most mortifying experiences of Kun’s life, being smiled at so smugly, adding to Ten’s already hefty—and honestly well-deserved, though annoying—ego.

But, it made Kun feel lighter. Made what had happened, this sharp, unexpected turn in his life, feel more real.

That shift in Kun’s mood was a palpable thing in the squad room when he’d been so strained before. It didn’t help that Ten kept smirking at him whenever Johnny passed, eyeing their interactions with barely restrained glee.

It made Sicheng suspicious, the other man shooting them questioning glances every time Ten tried to make a scene. And Kun could feel other sets of eyes on him, too; members of both their teams curious about why, suddenly, Kun was willing to go to lunch with Johnny, coming back smiling of all things.

No one pushed, though. Even Ten eventually let it rest with one last entertained snicker.

“You look genuinely happy for the first time in years,” Ten said with a shrug when Kun cast him a mildly distressed glance, worried about Ten’s easy give-in to the hissed order to behave.

“You don’t think we’re moving too fast, do you?” Kun asked, keeping his voice low and voicing the main worry still bouncing around his head. “I was ready to kill him at the start of this case and now we’re…”

“Fucking?”

“Yes.”

Ten snorted, reaching over to flick Kun on the forehead, Kun just frowning at him in consternation.

“You and Johnny always took things fast. You literally let him fuck you behind the training pitch.”

Kun gasped, voice lowering into a hissed whisper. “I never told you that, how did you—”

“I saw you, dumbass.”

Kun made a vague noise of distress, sinking down in his chair, ignoring the curious look he could feel Johnny sending him from across the room. His ears felt hot, embarrassment over past-Kun’s questionable decisions burning him up from the inside out.

“Oh God.”

“Yup,” Ten chirped. “Very bold of you, by the way, but not my point.”

“What _is_ your point then?” Kun grumbled.

“You jumped straight into things right from the start. Fast is just how things run with you two.” Ten smiled at Kun, a fondness in his eyes that came from climbing through the ranks together, clawing their way to where they were. “It’s not bad, Kun. It’s just how you guys roll.”

01110100

The universe seemed to reward Kun for finally getting his head out of his ass—even if his thoughts still wandered towards self-deprecation and doubt at times—their case finally, _finally_ seeming to look up when they found a bit of blood and tissue under the nails of their most recent victim.

She was the daughter of a big cyber-tech developer, equipped with stronger digital wards than the bureau’s psymechs had ever seen. According to Taeil, who did the postmortem on her cyberbrain himself, whatever the Dressmaker had done to subdue her hadn’t fully worked.

The girl, twenty year-old Kim Dani, had woken up while her skin was being sliced and put up a fight, scratching the Dressmaker in the process.

For the first time since the Dressmaker started killing twenty years ago, they had DNA to log and check through their database.

It was huge, a _chance_ , a light at the end of the long dark tunnel the Dressmaker had crafted.

Their team would’ve been remiss _not_ to charge at it full steam ahead.

01110100

The blood and skin they found under their victim’s nails led their team to an unassuming older man who worked at the confections store next-door to Ms. Kim’s internship.

On a hunch, Kun requested a small team of psymechs and forensic programmers to go with Sicheng and Yukhei when they went to bring the man in for questioning. It turned out to be a fruitful decision, what with how the man’s cyberbrain was nearly remotely shorted out.

They stabilized him, scanned him, and—by uploading his cyberbrain’s systems onto a computer cut off from any possible link-ups—managed to isolate a network of three other people being puppeteered by the Dressmaker.

It was a win that had the whole squad room buzzing with anticipatory energy. They weren’t close, they knew that—the Dressmaker was terribly smart, after all. But, they weren’t far.

Progress was being made.

01101001

Johnny got a call from one of the detectives from the original cases.

“Said he was nervous about how his partner was behaving in light of what happened to Wang Xinyu and the suspicions surrounding Detective Shen. He wants to meet and talk.”

Kun frowned. “And you’re going alone?”

“He sounded spooked,” Johnny explained. “I’m just gonna go get what he has to say and come back.”

“If you wait a bit, one of us could go with you.”

Johnny smiled down at him, unable to resist cooing at Kun despite the smattering of team members working out of the squad room today. Somewhere behind Johnny—where Kun couldn’t immediately see—some bold soul wolf whistled.

“I’ll be fine, Kun. It’s just a routine interview. Better to go and come back quickly.”

Kun clenched his jaw, unconvinced but aware he’d be a hypocrite to argue more when he’d just gotten his freedom from being escorted around himself.

“Let us know when you get there, then.”

Johnny hummed, eyes dancing with a playful light. He squeezed Kun’s shoulder as he past, touch trailing off, hot through the thin layers of Kun’s clothes.

“Aye, aye, captain.”

01101100

Johnny didn’t reach out.

Kun waited. One hour, two, three; the amount of time necessary to drive out to the 3rd ward’s border with the 1st—the area Johnny was supposed to be heading to.

He waited as patiently as he could, an itch at the back of his neck telling him that something was _wrong_ , even as he took turns with the members of Johnny’s unit, trying to reach Johnny through their link.

Kun waited, watching the time tick by. 

He hoped. He feared.

Johnny didn’t come back.

01101100

The whole team spent the night searching, calling, trying to trace Johnny’s location or reach him over comms.

In the morning, Kun stumbled back to the bureau, accompanied by an equally grave looking Ten.

They dragged heavy, tired feet up the building’s front steps, spotting Yukhei, Mark and Dejun just ahead.

Yukhei seemed to hear them coming, Kun and Ten having been discussing their next move, turning around, brows furrowed and eyes round with horror.

Kun froze, startled by the intensity of the expression, but then Mark was letting out a choked-off sob, knees giving out from under him, Dejun hurrying to catch him, and Kun was running.

“Kun,” Yukhei said, intercepting his approach, bodily blocking him, “It’s—we don’t know yet that it’s his.”

Kun’s head snapped up to the younger man’s, dread rising like a cold beast in his chest. “What do you mean?” In his periphery Mark was crying and Ten was cursing, voice a harsh hiss. “Yukhei, what—”

“What’s going on?”

There were more bureau agents coming up now, arriving for the start of their day.

Yukhei looked over at them, anxious, his hold on Kun loosening just enough for the smaller man to slip free and dart around.

Yukhei cursed.

Kun took two steps forward before coming to a screeching halt.

His fingers felt cold, the sounds of others coming near, whispering, fading to a wash of white noise.

Laid out on the floor in front of the bureau doors was a swath of flayed skin, sun touched, with a short, pale scar carved into a corner.

Above it, on the doors themselves at eye level, was a simple message.

_Goodbye : )_

01101001

The skin was Johnny’s.

Kun felt himself break.

00100000

Johnny was alive.

That was the assumption they operated under as they mounted a large-scale search for him.

It was grounded in an analysis of the skin that’d been left for them, and hope. Blind, desperate hope.

The cameras in front of the bureau turned up tampered with, a hack job that would’ve been sadly easy for someone existing more as data than a single, physical body. And, when they tried to track down the detective that had called Johnny, what they got instead was a highly confused detective that was completely clean.

No call, no odd behavior, no connection to Johnny.

So, instead, they tried to trace the phone number that’d called Johnny before his abduction, finding it to be a burner cell sold by some dingy shop in the 2nd ward, paid for with cash by someone the store owner called “unremarkable”.

Renjun attempted to track the location of the call itself, maybe get a general area for where it originated from, what towers it might’ve bounced off of. What he got instead was four hours of wasted time and a ping-ponging web of cell towers, courtesy of a spoofed line.

Mark, Dejun, and Jisung tried to trace Johnny’s steps through street cameras, spending days down in the data port room, hooked up to the processors there and submerging themselves in the recorded footage. Eventually, Jaemin and Kunhang joined them, taking on the task of tracking Johnny’s car while the other three kept scouring through hours of street cam footage, running a facial recognition software over top it.

They managed to pick him up on a highway cam driving out of the ward and heading towards the 1st. But, when he crossed in to the 3rd they ran into interference, the footage corrupted and unusable.

Nothing was working. _Nothing was working_.

“Shouldn’t we be able to connect with him?” Kun asked, biting at an already mauled thumbnail, pacing down in the psymech’s lab, having come to check if Johnny was still considered ‘online’ by their systems. “So long as the neural link wasn’t broken, shouldn’t we be able to reach him? Find him?”

“Technically, yes,” Taeil said, him and another technician—a tall man with a soft face and orange hair who introduced himself as Jungwoo—assigned to the search due to skill and seniority. “When we tried earlier, though, we got stopped by one of the more advanced trap barriers I’ve ever seen.”

“Someone would have to break through that barrier, and whatever other ones have been put in place, to follow the line back to Johnny,” Jungwoo explained. “Doing that, though, you run the risk of getting your own cyberbrain fried to bits.”

“But if we get through, we’ll be able to connect with Johnny?” Kun asked, desperate for any sort of straw to grasp at, any type of chance.

“If he’s...alive,” Taeil said, carefully, watching for Kun’s reaction, “Then, yes.”

01101100

Kun volunteered for the dive without a second thought. 

He was hooked up to one of the psymechs’ pods, so that they could monitor vitals and actively assist with his firewalls and barrier defences. They tried their best to describe what he might face, and then they went to get the pod up and running.

Kun closed his eyes, feeling himself submerge into the sea of ones and zeroes. When he opened them again it was to the clear waters of his lobby, the doors that led to his team’s links haloed with a pale blue glow.

He found Johnny’s, floating over to it, and pushed.

There was immediate resistance, a back-hack system kicking into gear, taking the form of large, red, glowing spikes that pierced through the carefully kept walls of kun’s digital lobby.

It hurt like a motherfucker, the pain dripping down Kun’s spine like bits of molten glass. 

He pushed through it.

The psymechs work on the outside helped deconstruct the attack, dissolving it so Kun could go through. He moved methodically, stepping into a space that warped around him, threatening to fold in on him, trap him, crush him. Kun cleared each fresh area he was thrown into like he’d clear a room, conscious of corners and shadows, of shifting floors and changing environments. Anything that could trip him up and leave him stranded in this digital void.

Kun wasn’t sure how long he’d spent trudging through traps and sludge-like barriers, but when he popped out into a clear but dim space that felt familiar— _friendly_ —the time and exhaustion felt like it faded away.

 _I reached him_ , he sent back to the psymechs monitoring his progress, relief coloring his tone. _Attempting to connect and sync now_.

This part was easier. It said something about how open Johnny had always meant to be to him that his systems welcomed Kun with open arms. That they let Kun slide into a position of control, giving up access to his neural and bodily functions.

Kun felt his heart pounding, wondering for a moment if it was really his, or if it was Johnny’s instead.

 _Please let this work,_ he prayed, calling out to any divinity that would answer. _Please_.

Kun paused, centered himself, his focus, and then felt himself spread.

Johnny was in pain. That was the first thing Kun registered, experiencing it on a muted level. He was also barely breathing, every inhale whistling through his lungs, and every exhale rasping out wet.

His head felt heavy, but Kun urged Johnny’s brain to send commands for his muscles to comply, raising his head in increments with great effort.

Then, it was the eyes, prying them open requiring even more precise muscle control. Kun managed it, though, getting his eyelids to lift just enough so that he could see that Johnny was slumped on the floor of a dingy, dark room, his prosthetic limbs disarticulated around him.

Panic spiked in Kun’s throat for a moment, almost jostling him from where he’d been able to anchor himself in Johnny’s systems.

It took a moment for Kun to resettle, noticing a flash of movement in the corner of Johnny’s eye.

Kun forced Johnny’s line of sight to shift, feeling Johnny’s exhaustion like a strong current fighting back. And then Detective Shen—or his body, with the Dressmaker at the helm—came into view, a window beyond him; the 2nd ward’s skyline and the bureau building’s proud jut creating a backdrop.

Vicious satisfaction ripped through Kun like wild fire as he broadcasted back what he was seeing.

 _We’ve got you, motherfucker. Just you fucking wait_. To Johnny, before Kun had to return to his own mind: _Hold on, big guy. We’re coming for you_.

01101111

They set up an electrical net around the whole district Kun had broadcasted back from, cutting off any route of digital escape, trapping the Dressmaker both physically with the perimeter their squad had set up and on the cyber level within Detective Shen’s body.

With a practiced calm, their team quietly cleared house after house until they knocked on a door and someone who’d been presumed missing in relation to the case answered.

Their eyes went wide, staring at Kun dressed in his dark tac-suit, gun in hand. They took one step back before the air smelled like smoke and the body collapsed.

“He’s trying to ping between the bodies on his network, “ Kun said, voice deadly calm, stepping over the now fully dead body and leading the way in, turning on his suit’s camouflage. “Assume there are more hostiles inside, move out.”

Yukhei, Mark, Sicheng, Dejun, and Donghyuck followed behind him, activating their suits’ camo setting as well with an in tandem, “Yes, sir.”

‘More hostiles’ didn’t quite cover the absolute nest of bodies they found inside, at least a third of which activated and attempted to attack, swinging at air with unseeing eyes. 

Kun dodged as many as he could, pressing forward the whole time, determined to reach the second floor at all costs.

When a few determined enough puppets managed to grab onto him, Kun fired down at their knees, then re-aimed and took them out with clean shots to the head. He repeated the process, ducking and dodging when he could, spinning and kicking with his gun carefully aimed when he couldn’t.

Sending a puppet body flying to the side with a hard kick to its knee and a swift throw over his shoulder, Kun broke out of the fray and reached the stairs.

 _I’m going up!_ He sent to his team, running up the stairs two at a time.

He reached the top floor’s landing and immediately swept the area for threats. There were three doors up here, but only one of them was open in invitation.

Kun didn’t need to guess that it was a trap. He didn’t care. He was here to save Johnny and apprehend a killer. If the Dressmaker wanted to corner him, he was free to fucking try.

With that mindset firmly in place, Kun advanced on the open room, bracing himself for what he knew he’d see when he turned the corner.

Of course, seeing the damage from Johnny’s eyes and seeing it head on, standing across from him, were two vastly different things.

Kun felt a suffocating red rage burn his lungs at the sight of Johnny, naked, sat against the wall like some sick sort of display, prosthetic limbs spread out in neat order around him—except for his left arm, _that_ looked like it’d been crushed and ripped from its setting.

Johnny was sitting in a puddle of prosthetic fluid and blood, the places where skin had been taken from his shoulder to his right pec exposed to the air. He looked barely alive, his chest rising in slow, hardly perceptible breaths.

Banishing the thought of infection and possible death from his mind, Kun deactivated his tac-suit’s camo and stepped into the room.

The Dressmaker—mind split and fractured to the point of running on pure carnal instincts—wasted no time in charging him.

He tackled Kun to the floor with a grunt, trying to get his arms around around a joint, his middle, his neck, anywhere that he could squeeze and break, utilizing the strength Detective Shen’s upgraded body provided. Kun, who’d never been the biggest or the strongest, was used to fighting opponents with the upper hand, though.

Kun jammed a hard, reinforced elbow into the Dressmaker’s face, once, twice, three times, grinning in feral satisfaction when he heard the _crunch_ of fake bone giving, hot blood splurting out of the Dressmaker’s nose.

From there, Kun was able to knee him in the gut, crawling out from under him enough to grab a fistfull of the Dressmaker’s hair and slam his head into the floor. When the Dressmaker grunted, trying to get back up, Kun did it again, and again—at one point bringing the Dressmaker’s head back onto his knee, smashing the borrowed body in the temple.

The Dressmaker gurgled, twitching, eyes rolling wildly. A normal person would’ve been long dead. Even an enhanced body, with a sane brain, would have been down for the count.

But the Dressmaker wasn’t running at full functioning capacity. He was going on a single desire: to kill, and to take, his fascination with natural skin amplified and further twisted. So, despite the blood dripping down his face in thick rivulets, he still tried to push himself to his feet.

Kun got there first, muzzle of his gun held close to the Dressmaker’s face.

The Dressmaker laughed, a horrible, hacking sound, head tilting at what should’ve been a painful angle as he turned to face Kun.

“Y—you’ll never, catch m—me.”

“We just did,” Kun said, voice flat.

“I a—am m— _many_. I—I am f— _free_.”

“You’re not.”

“Y—you c—can’t—”

“Of course I can, because we’ve caught you.” Kun raised an eyebrow, tone cold. “Want to know how?”

“I—I w—will es-cape, I w—will—”

“It’s because you fucked up.” The Dressmaker stared up at him, face falling, exaggerated and out of his control. “You got ambitious. Split yourself into too many bodies, stretched your mind until it snapped. And then you messed up, let a girl go, let another scratch you, let government agents get too close.”

“I n—ne-ver—”

“You did. Though your biggest mistake was taking him.”

The Dressmaker giggled then, an oddly metallic noise that echoed in ways it shouldn’t have. “I s—saw him thr—through your e—eyes.”

Kun smiled, dark and dangerous, the expression stopping far from his eyes. “We probably wouldn’t’ve found you if you hadn’t taken him.”

There was a loud final bang from downstairs and then silence. The Dressmaker’s eyes widened, wobbled.

“Sounds like you’re the last body standing.”

The Dressmaker ground his teeth, the sound grating and warped from the force, pushing himself up and throwing himself forward with a growled out “ _You—_ ”

Kun fired. A clean shot through the forehead. The Dressmaker fell, dead.

A ringing silence as Kun’s ears tried to adjust to the sharp noise, and then heavy footsteps rushing upstairs.

“ _Kun!_ ” Yukhei shouted.

 _Report_ , Ten demanded from his station out by the net’s edge.

 _Bring EMTs in to help move Johnny’s body_ , Kun sent out, turning on his heel to go crouch by Johnny’s side, checking his pulse, his breathing, feeling a kernel of relief take root when he confirmed that Johnny was alive despite being dismantled. _He needs emergency services, now._

 _Roger_ , Ten replied just Yukhei and the others came storming into the room.

“Oh fuck.”

“ _Johnny_ ,” Mark gasped, stumbling over to sink to the ground on Johnny’s other side, taking up his hand with watery eyes.

“He’ll be all right,” Kun said, hoping that with enough conviction he could will that wish into being true. “He’ll be alright.”

Kun brushed a hand through Johnny’s lank hair, leaning in to press his forehead against Johnny’s temple, heart beating a bruising tempo against his ribs. “He has to be.”

01110110

Kun didn’t leave Johnny’s side.

He stayed with him in the ambulance, combing gentle fingers through his hair as medics hurried to check his vitals and ensure they stayed stable.

Kun stayed with Johnny as they wheeled him into the hospital, sweating under his tac-suit in distress, hair sticking to his forehead and eyes wide, adrenaline still pumping hard through Kun’s veins.

He stayed through the surgery, eventually forced into one of the waiting room chairs by a worried Sicheng, Ten taking up the seat next to him, grabbing onto Kun’s hand and squeezing. They were still in their tac-suits too, Kun realized. And, when he looked around, he realized that their whole team—both Johnny’s and his—had congregated around them. 

Some looked like they needed medical attention themselves in the light of the hospital, now that adrenaline wasn’t actively pumping through their veins—Donghyuck was sporting a mean bruise across half his face, Yukhei was cradling his ribs, Dejun’s hand had been hurriedly wrapped in gauze—but no one moved. They stayed where they were until a surgeon dressed in blue and a psymech dressed in red came out to tell them that Johnny was all right. That he’d been put back together safely, the internal bleeding from being beaten had been stopped, and the synthetic skin graft had taken and merged.

That was almost seven hours after arriving in a flurry of urgency.

But Kun waited.

01100101

Johnny’s family was a country away, so Kun took up the responsibility of talking with the attending doctor about the damage done and the requirements for recovery. It was explained to Kun that there’d been ruptures, muscles and ligaments torn when his arm had been broken and ripped out. That he’d likely been worked over by a highly amplified cyborg body in the initial abduction—evidence in the denting of his bones, almost all of them reinforced over the years with high-grade surgical steel—and that he was immensely lucky to be alive.

“Tough bastard,” Kun whispered, sitting bedside, drawing his fingers up and down the line of Johnny’s forearm.

Johnny was out in an induced coma to ensure that his prosthetics attached and set properly. Knowing that he wouldn’t be woken up for another five days, Kun had gone home to finally shower and properly clean up—as opposed to the quick scrub down and change he’d done once they knew Johnny was through the woods. 

He came in every day, sometimes staying overnight, unable to fully detach himself just yet after the whole gamut of emotions he’d gone through in under a week. Kun felt like he’d just gotten Johnny back, almost to have him permanently wrenched away again. There was no way he could bring himself to leave him for very long.

Kun wasn’t the only one camping out and typing up end-of-action reports in the private room Johnny had been moved to, though.

Their whole team cycled through at one point of another, bringing food and work, and then quietly saying their goodbyes when visiting hours came to a close.

Kun was the only one practically living there, though. A fact he told himself Johnny wouldn’t mind, even if he’d chide Kun for it. After all, Johnny had done the same for him when the Dressmaker had left him hospitalized.

It only felt fair.

What it meant, though, is that Kun fell asleep, five days later, and missed Johnny waking up. In return, Kun was roused from a restless sleep by fingers in his hair and nails gently scratching over his scalp.

“Mm,” he nearly groaned, blinking blearily as he leaned into the touch still half-asleep.

The deep laugh that followed, though, had him shooting up into a seated position, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with quick fingers.

Johnny was awake, looking a bit worse for wear, definitely tired, but handsome all the same. And he was smiling at Kun, _for_ Kun— _only_ for Kun.

“Hi,” he said, voice scratchy and hoarse.

“Hi,” Kun breathed, shuffling his chair closer to the head of the bed, nuzzling into the hand that was raised with a short wince to cup his cheek. “You’re awake. When did you wake up?”

“Mm, maybe twenty, thirty minutes ago?”

Kun sputtered out a startled laugh. “And you just let me sleep?”

“You look very handsome when you’re sleeping,” Johnny told him, a small drowsy smirk curling at his lips.

Kun laughed, ducking his head, a pleased flush burning a path up his neck. “You’re impossible.”

Johnny chuckled. He slid his hand further around to the side of Kun’s head, putting the lightest amount of pressure urging him closer.

Kun went easily, propping himself up on the bed’s mattress to gain leverage as he leaned closer, letting Johnny pull him into a soft, slow kiss.

He had morning breath—not as bad as Kun would have expected it to be—but it didn’t matter. The kiss was still sweet; desperately missed, and desperately needed. Just a simple slide of lips with the lightest brushing of tongue.

Kun sighed when they parted, Johnny chasing his mouth with a high whine. Kun snorted, impossibly fond.

Pressing their foreheads together, he asked: “How’re you feeling?”

“Rough,” Johnny sighed, “but better.” He licked his lips. “You?”

Kun smiled, brushing their noses together. When he spoke, it was with his lips brushing Johnny’s on every word: “Now? Much, much better.”

Their second kiss turned into a third turned into a fourth, soft breaths puffing out between them as they separated and came together again.

Against all of Kun’s better judgement, he allowed himself to be lured up onto Johnny’s lap with coaxing hands and desperate exhalations of, “ _Please_.”

“Move and I’ll stop,” Kun told him, heart already racing, breathing coming heavier.

Johnny nodded, staring up at him with dazed awe dancing in his eyes.

Kun dove back in, sliding his tongue between Johnny’s parted lips, tracing over his teeth, his hard palate, curling around Johnny’s tongue until Johnny was moaning low in his throat. Kun rocked his hips down, already half-hard and rapidly filling out in his pants, swallowing down Johnny’s gasp and letting out his own moan in encouragement when Johnny’s arms came up to wrap around him in the tightest circle they could manage.

From there, things spiralled.

Fucking in a hospital bed wasn’t one of Kun’s brightest moments, but seeing the pure affection in Johnny’s eyes, the wonder, as Kun slid down on his cock—pants and boxer-briefs tossed somewhere he’d have to hunt for later and prepped in a hurry—was worth the risk of discovery.

“I love you,” Johnny breathed into Kun’s neck, doing his best to hold still while Kun fucked down on him, fast and hard. He panted, harsh and damp against Kun’s skin. “ _I missed you._ ”

Kun, a hand buried in Johnny’s hair, yanked his head back so he could slot their mouths together, the kiss more tongue and teeth by that point. “Missed you too.”

Fire was licking his veins, his heart hammering in his chest, cock hard and oozing precum between their bodies. His thighs burned like a motherfucker but he was so close, arousal coiling tighter and tighter in his gut.

Johnny moved one hand from around Kun’s waist to slide it between them, curling his fingers around Kun’s cock and thumbing his slit. Kun’s back arched, pleasure rocketing through him from head to toe, muscles tensing, and then he was coming, spilling wet and hot between them.

He rolled his hips in tight, grinding circles, riding out his orgasm, body tightening around Johnny where he was buried deep.

Johnny hiccuped around a startled groan, following Kun over the edge and spilling inside him, filling him up.

It’d be a bitch to clean himself up once he crawled off of Johnny’s lap, so Kun stayed for a bit, breathing deeply, nose tucked under Johnny’s ear. Johnny didn’t seem to mind, wiping his dirty hand on the bed sheet before bringing his arms up around Kun again, keeping him close and peppering any exposed skin he could reach with kisses.

“Hey,” he said, mouthing softly at the skin just under Kun’s jaw.

“Mm?” Kun hummed, still catching his breath.

“How’re we doing?”

Kun leaned back enough to press a sleepy kiss to Johnny’s forehead, his cheek, his nose, his lips. They still had a lot to work out, to talk through—properly—but Kun felt at peace for the first time in a while.

“Better,” he told Johnny, voice barely more than a whisper, smiling so hard his cheeks hurt, “Much, much better.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you've gotten this far I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
